Good news to people sharing music. QTrax has just been launched this week. For the uninitiated, QTrax is a peer-to-peer music sharing program. This platform is perfectly free, and perfectly legal. It is supported by ads. QTrax boasts of 25 million songs in its repertoire. That is a huge collection! Even five times more than that of iTunes!

Any song that you want will be downloaded into the QTrax program. While you are happily listening to the music, advertisements from QTrax sponsors will be displayed. As much as two-thirds of these ads will not go to QTrax, however, rather this fraction will go to the record labels in exchange of the license they provide to QTrax.

Since these songs come directly from the record labels, Digital Rights Management is implemented by the program. This means that the music cannot be downloaded to the drive of your digital music player like iPod. That is perhaps the greatest drawback of the system and may discourage music lovers from enjoying QTrax.

This is perhaps another effort to marry Old Media with the New. The trouble is, some of the sensibilities of using new media appear incompatible with that of the Old. It remains to be seen how QTrax will be accepted by music lovers worldwide.

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