• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, March 4, 2008

In a step toward offering free music downloads, Qtrax Monday announced it had agreements with two publishers: Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which expanded a prior deal with Qtrax, and EMI Publishing, which renewed one with the company.

Before Qtrax can actually offer free downloads from EMI or Sony, however, it also needs to forge agreements with the record labels. EMI Publishing owns more than one million copyrights to tracks by a roster including Arctic Monkeys, Kanye West and Amy Winehouse, while Sony/ATV Music Publishing's boasts 600,000 copyrights to tracks by artists like Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Shakira.

EMI confirmed the deal renewal. Sony did not return a telephone call seeking comment.

Qtrax boasted in January, at the Midem conference in Cannes, that it was launching a free ad-supported download service with more than 25 million tracks. But shortly after the announcement was made, it came to light that none of the four major labels had agreed to licenses.

The company bills itself as a download service, but unlike iTunes or Amazon.com, users must be online to play back the tracks. The service also comes bundled with a browser that will track users' purchases. Qtrax has entered into affiliate arrangements to enable it to get a share of revenue from a wide variety of online purchases--including DVDs, books, computers, even travel--made through its browser.

Qtrax CEO Allan Klepfisz said he anticipates that the company will soon enable users to transfer the tracks to some portable devices. Even with that ability, however, people probably won't be able to transfer tracks to iPods easily, because the downloads will still be wrapped in Windows Media DRM. Apple's iPod only accept tracks in MP3 format or wrapped with Apple's FairPlay DRM.