'Free & Legal' Peer-to-Peer Music Service Jumps Gun On Deal

Posted by Eriq Gardner

Never announce a deal before the contract is fully signed.

That's a no-brainer for even the most junior deal attorneys. But someone forgot to tell QTRAX. The upstart music service put out a showy press release trumpeting the "first free P2P service to be fully embraced by the music industry." The company said it had licensed between 25 and 30 million copyrighted tracks from all the major labels, publishers and a host of leading indies.

Not so fast. Warner Music quickly put out its own statement saying it hadn't "authorized the use of our content on Qtrax's recently announced service." Universal and EMI claimed they hadn't either. Qtrax then acknowledged the deal wasn't finalized. Oops.