It‘s like opening the doors to your new Cheese Shop, without stocking any actual cheese. Qtrax spent over a million dollars on a gala launch party Sunday night at a music conference in Cannes. The subsidiary of Brilliant Technologies had arranged names like James Blunt, LL Cool J and Don Henley to trumpet the groundbreaking music file sharing service that promised users 25 million free songs.

Not many understood exactly how the labels were on board or exactly how it could be profitable to give away free music. Since record labels have always tried to stop the efforts of peer file sharing, Qtrax seemed too good to be true.

Monte Python’s Cheese Shop

Let’s see… free music files shared over Qtrax’s new peer-to-peer scheme, something about advertisers and contracts with major recording labels.

Now, about those contracts with the labels…

It turned out to be one the biggest blunders in the music industry. Just before the launch event in Cannes it was discovered that Qtrax hadn’t actually secured any contracts with major labels.

Needless to say, the party broke up.

The comedy continued as company CEO Alan Klepfisz provided a conspiracy theory to the press.

"We are not idiots, we wouldn’t have launched the service in front of the whole music industry unless we had secured its backing. We feel we have been unfairly crucified because a competitor tried to damage us. Everyone is very upset… "

Qtrax stock cash out

Qtrax might have had other motives. Riding the coat-tails of the ramp-up and gala launch of the revolutionary music service that didn’t exist was a two-day 50% increase in Brilliant Technology stock.

Brilliant Technology

It’s difficult to believe this was a just a stock scam. But perhaps if you got out soon enough you might have been one of the lucky ones.

Tags: Blu-ray

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 10:22 am and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.