With more than 300,000 tracks and 50,000 albums published since its inception, the music publishing website Jamendo holds one the greatest libraries of free music online. A great success story that is in part powered by BitTorrent. From the start the site embraced P2P downloads to save resources and because artists and fans appreciated it.
The South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival is one of the largest and most popular in the United States. For the seventh year in a row, SXSW is sharing DRM-free, RIAA-safe songs of performing artists, totalling 4,49 GB so far. All the tracks can now be downloaded for free in one go, thanks to BitTorrent.
Today BitTorrent Inc. announced two new Apps for uTorrent, one in collaboration with the organization that hosts the TED conferences and another that allows users to discover free music. The latter App is the winner of the uTorrent App developer challenge. It’s coded by Steven Viola who happened to have just released a TV-app through which users can download and subscribe to shows published on EZTV.
A study conducted by PRS, the British music royalty collection agency, looked into the downloading habits of the average user of file-sharing networks. They found that the most downloaded tracks mimic the music charts. That is, people tend to download music that’s already popular.
The term ’3 strikes’ is well known in file-sharing circles – infringe on copyrights and face Internet disconnection. But every coin has two sides, day can eclipse night and evil can be countered by good. Free music service Jamendo continues the theme by shunning ’3 Strikes’ and embracing ’3 Thanks’ for downloaders.
Despite being ensnared in legal proceedings with the MPAA, isoHunt is continuing to grow. Adding fuel to the ‘significant non-infringing use’ argument is their latest partnership, with the Creative Commons music distribution site Jamendo.
Jamendo.com offers over 4000 free music albums, all published under a Creative Commons license. The albums are available in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis format, free of DRM of course.
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