QTrax and Universal in Partnership for Legal P2P Music

Following a publishing arrangement with EMI and Sony/ATV (updated) last month Qtrax continued its development plan and shook hands now with the largest major label, Universal Music Group.

As Qtrax has a deal standing by with Universal's publishing group, any legal holdups keeping the company from including Universal's music in its service are now gone.

Qtrax is an ad-supported Windows-only P2P application based on Songbird open-source media player that allows users share DRM-protected music with each other for free. The role of DRM is to ensure that the songs won’t “pass” onto unauthorized networks, but also to set up the "parameters" Qtrax will use to know exactly how much to pay artists, labels and publishers. There are ads being showed while you’re searching and downloading and there’s always the option to purchase music and merchandise using the service.

The company's future is starting to look bright as other labels are likely to get in line behind Universal and we might not be surprised to find Qtrax some time from now making available more music than iTunes currently does, for free. However, lately the company has been bumping into different licensing issues which prove that Qtrax’s ambition to offer the approximately 25 million songs you can find on file sharing networks might be a hard stone to carry.

A Mac version release is due on May 18.