I originally heard about this on my local TV news station yesterday and the first thing that came to mind was along the lines of "Rubbish!" - In this day and age, when it sounds too good to be true? it most always is.

I'm talking about FREE legalised music downloading folks; Something you'd have thought would be shut down in a heartbeat is safe and open for the masses to take advantage of.

The new service is called QTrax and will be an ad-supported P2P arrangement; the exciting news is that the team has managed to announce deals with almost every major record label out there with a catalogue of over 25,000,000 songs going up for grabs.

It's not without one major annoyance though, as they haven't been able to shake off the Digital Rights Management (DRM) content (yet!).

More details on how it's all shaping up at bit-tech and The Register.

The service is based on a blacklist/whitelist/greylist system. The blacklist covers all the artists who have said "no way, no how" to digital distribution (I'm guessing the Purple Midget is on that one), and blocks such music from being shared via the system. The whitelist is all the artists who have said "yeah, baby!". The greylist is possibly the most interesting part of the system, however: it's all the stuff that's floating around there on other less salubrious P2P networks and that hasn't been officially okayed or blocked.