Having learnt to play the piano at an early age, I have always had a fondness for new and interesting music which is often difficult to discover and can be hard to buy.
I mentioned in an earlier post about Pandora whichis a tremendous site for helping you discover music that you like, based on a clever algorithm that defines music is very detailed genres. I love Pandora and have discovered many new artists that I would never have known about. In fact I often have it on for background music when I am working from my home office.
Today I discovered another music site called Jamendo which allows musicians to share their music, and consumers to listen, tag and review and even download with bit torrents.
Jamendo is a new model for artists to promote, publish, and be paid for their music. On jamendo, the artists distribute their music under Creative Commons licenses. In a nutshell, they allow you to download, remix and share their music freely. It’s a “Some rights reserved” agreement, perfectly suited for the new century. These new rules make jamendo able to use the new powerful means of digital distribution like Peer-to-Peer networks such as BitTorrent or eMule to legally distribute albums at near-zero cost. jamendo users can discover and share albums, but also review them or start a discussion on the forums. Albums are democratically rated based on the visitors’ reviews. If they fancy an artist they can support him by making a donation.
It’s a fantastic concept and a great site to visit if you like original music, curently mostly from Europe. As a user, you can build your own playlist and it will play them using your default mp3 player. Jamendo also has a built in SHARE it function, allowing you to share your favourite albums with your friends .. no doubt capitalising on the viral aspects of new music discovery. For artists, Jamendo is a great way to share your creations with the world, both on the Jamendo site, and on your own site by simply copying the script of your playlist.
A great example of “open source” music, and a potentially disruptive business model.
