Crenk

Qtrax, the P2P music service that about four months ago claimed to have signed deals with all four major record labels, has finally signed their first major label. Universal Music Group are the first major label to sign up to Qtrax. This is the company’s first major label licensing deal, although it does have several publishing agreements with the likes of EMI Music Publishing and Sony/ATV, among others.

The service itself allows users to share DRM protected music. The DRM is obviously there to keep the music off other networks, but at the same time is helps Qtrax to establish the play counts in which they will use to pay royalties to artists and labels. Qtrax also has display ads in certain sections of the process, and users have the option to purchase music and merchandise through the service. Hang on one sec, they are a startup with an actual business model that might work, thats crazy!

A couple of weeks ago Spiral Frog claimed that they were the third largest legal music download store, now they are reporting some very interesting news. SpiralFrog has announced a licensing agreement with RoyaltyShare to add its independent label customers to the free ad supported service.  Indie label MPress has also been added to the SpiralFrog catalog which now tops 1 million tracks.

Minic over at 901am has reported that Spiral Frog is now the third largest legal music download site. Spiral Frog reports that they have 850,000 registered users, thus putting them in third largest behind iTunes and Rhapsody. The company also reports that their traffic is also increasing at a constant rate, already surpassing two million unique visitors for March.

Im not really too sure if Spiral Frog should claim the fact that they are the third largest legal download store, mainly because they dont actually sell anything compared to iTunes and Rhapsody. Therefore, they should really be in first place, because people are willing to sign up to something in which they have the opportunity to get something for free rather than paying.

This is quite funny actually. Bruce over at Hypebot has been running a poll on which paid download service has the best chance of success - Spiral Frog, We7 or Other. The poll ran for 7 days, after 6 days he only had 100 votes with 80% of the votes going to We7. Then suddenly this morning Bruce noticed that the 100 votes was now 650 and now with Spiral Frog slightly ahead. Of course it looks like someone from Spiral Frog just kept logging on to the site and voting for themselves, pretty sad really! But then again it is Spiral Frog.