UNINNOVATE / Engineering At Its Finest

The tagline for Jamendo.com reads “Welcome to our free music world.” It’s certainly not the whole world, but the site is growing quickly. Jamendo.com (whose name is a combination of the words “jam” and “crescendo”) provides over full 2000 albums for free. You can listen to tracks online with their web-based music player or you can download full albums in high quality using bittorrent. More importantly, all of the music is licensed with a Creative Commons license, so all of this is completely legal and encouraged by the artists. And if you find something you like, Jamendo.com lets you directly pay the artists whatever amount you choose.

Jamendo.com has several great community features. Users can tag music with descriptive terms like “jazz” or “ambient” to help other users find new music that they might like. Each tag is also available as an rss feed, so you can use an rss feed reader to subscribe to new music that matches your selected descriptive terms. The Jamendo community is also very active in rating and posting reviews of albums, so it is easy to see what is worth checking out. And for musicians looking for source material to sample or remix, Jamendo allows you to search for music by license so it’s easy to find artists that allow remixing and sampling.

Jamendo.com is the sort of thing that terrifies the major record labels: Free music with non-restrictive licensing available online in new and innovative ways. While most of these artists are clearly comfortable living in the long tail and not likely to start showing up in the Top 40 anytime soon, Jamendo.com is building a platform that can do things that other music stores can’t because of restrictive licensing. You can browse around Jamendo and create a playlist as you go. If you like the playlist, you can click a link to export it to your blog or save it as a podcast. Email the link to your friends and they can instantly listen to all the music, find other artists related to the ones that they liked, and pass it on to their friends. In other words, new and better ways of exploring music are possible because the music can go wherever the user wants it to go.

Other online music stores that rely on DRM to make music less copyable are also making it less useful and thus less valuable. While it is yet to be seen if Jamendo.com will appeal to anyone other than devoted music fans and musicians, it is clear that the types of things Jamendo is doing with music sharing and community interaction is quite a bit ahead of anything the music stores run by the major labels are doing.

Give it Jamendo.com a try with the tag-cloud below. Click on a tag to find music that matches the tag (the size of the text indicates the popularity of the tag):

acoustic alternative ambiance ambient atmospheric bass batterie blues breakbeat calme celtic chanson chansonfrancaise chansons chillout classique conceptalbum cool courdesmiracles culte dance dark delirant disco doux downtempo dub easylistening eclectic electrojazz electronica electropop electrorock emotion energique envoutant experimental festif film folk francaise french fun funk fusion genius gothic groove grunge guitar hardcore hardrock heavy hiphop house humour idm improvisation inclassable indie industrial instrumental jazz jazzrock latino live lounge melancolic melodic metal minimalist musique newage noise original piano planant poetique pop poprock postrock progressif progressive psychedelic punk rap reggae relax reposant rock rockfrancais rockindependant roots sensible ska solo sombre soul soundtrack space strange sympa synthetiseur techno texte textes trance trash trip triphop variete violon vocal voix world zen