Recently, beleaguered music companies discovered that what Steve Jobs has been doing to them for the last few years is what they’d been doing to consumers for many years previous to that and guess what? It hurts!

Then over the weekend at Midem, Qtrax boldly ventured forth with its ad-supported free download business model- ‘From today, feel free to download another 25 million songs - legally’

Sadly no deals had been finalised. As Bart the Amnaoiseach would say, it was all ’smokes and daggers’. You couldn’t make up such ineptness - according to themselves, Qtrax have been working on this for 4 years.

Kudos to the Qtrax PR people for getting the (wrong) word out there, but surely they realised who they were trying to play hardball with? When I initially scanned the Times article I was surprised that the big four music companies were actually doing something to try and loosen Apple’s firm grasp on their online revenues.

However it seems that isn’t the case. We can look forward to more attempted litigation aimed at filesharers in jurisdictions outside the US. We can also look forward to a continued stream of focus-group identified pre-chewed ‘music’ which we didn’t ask for. I’m looking at you, Louis Walsh,

a man who still equates artistic worth with financial success as that allows him to cast himself as a sort of modern-day Phil Spector, instead of someone who makes his living selling children’s music to slow adults.

Thank you Graham Linehan

The £500K (Sterling) launch party, the hype, the advertising-supported business model, it’s all sounding awfully familiar. I’m also taken with the eagerness of understaffed weekend newsrooms to reprint press releases. Some things never change.

Of course, it could be a fiendishly clever reverse-hype anti-marketing campaign. Mention of Qtrax will waft around the web for a while, then just when the buzz is dying down the CEOs of Warners, Sony, EMI and BMG will appear on the (obviously inferior) screens of non-Apple MP3 players. Dressed as the Fab Four, they’ll tell us that it was all just a clever jape, and if you point your browser to Ptrax.com you can download up to at least 300 free songs. Yay!

If you’re still interested, have a look at Qtrax. Will they still be around at the end of the year?

Edit: Excellent piece in the Guardian.