By sheer volume the number of downloads these lesser known bands accumulate might only be a fraction of those generated by the Britney Spears and Duffys of this world, but 10,000 downloads is pretty significant for developing artists. Artists need to be heard in order to build a steady fanbase.

Revenue wise, most artists trying to earn a living making music only have a moderate income, and every fan counts. Generally, they don’t make much from album sales – contracts where the band/artist gets less than 10% of the revenue are quite common. Merchandising and playing gigs are the largest source of income, income that is generated by fans.

If the average artist can pick up a few hundred extra fans by giving away his music for free, this can make a huge difference. This group might not be that interesting for the record labels and the royalty collectors, who tend to feed off the top 1% of artists who are generally well marketed by million dollar budgets from the music industry.

Contrary to the conclusions of the PRS study, a special brand of ‘pirates’ are particularly interested in new and unsigned bands. On the music tracker What.cd, which hosts almost 100,000 users, the most downloaded album ever is a compilation of unsigned artists. Second is an album from The Flashbulb, with 10 times as many downloads as Britney Spears’ Greatest Hits collection.

Similarly, on the music sharing website Jamendo thousands of artists are giving away their music for free. Rob Costlow, one of the early adopters of the site told TorrentFreak that thanks to this free music model, he is able to make a living off his passion. His most popular album on Jamendo was downloaded over 80,000 times while nearly half a million listened to it on the website.

So, even though the vast majority of the the users of file-sharing services download music from the top of the charts, there is undoubtedly a huge potential for new artists to market themselves through file-sharing. Perhaps less interesting for the major labels who make most money off cleverly marketed top acts, but extremely valuable for the average artist trying to make a living off music.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Luxembourg-based music platform and community Jamendo has well over half a million members, more than 100,000 album reviews and in excess of 17,000 albums on offer – all of them free to download. Jamendo lets artists keep 50% of the revenue generated and almost 100% of the donations received by the site go to the artists too.

In order to make a statement amidst escalating discussion on ‘3 Strikes’ regimes, Jamendo has launched a scheme of its own. Called ‘3 Thanks’, Jamendo has turned the music industry’s strategy on its head. From now on, Jamendo will send a ‘thank you’ email to anyone who downloads any of the tracks (currently around 200,000) from the site, while encouraging them to share with their friends.

Jamendo’s ‘2nd Strike’ will be signaled by the most active downloaders receiving not a warning letter, but a ‘thank you’ note bundled with an “accomplice kit” containing stickers and other goodies.

In complete contrast to the plans of IFPI (which plans to disconnect people on their ‘3rd Strike’), Jamendo will seek out their most active supporters who are able to convince a bar, restaurant, shop or hotel to sign up to the PRO service, and actually pay their ISP bill for the month.

TorrentFreak caught up with Jamendo creator Sylvain Zimmer who told us that he is delighted to be able to launch this initiative worldwide. Clearly Jamendo feel there are better methods of doing business than lobbying for punitive measures against consumers. But what should be done instead?

“We strongly think that the music economy is all about the relation between the artist and its fans : punishing them won’t do any good,” Sylvain told TorrentFreak.

“On Jamendo we try to make that relationship stronger, and we have seen over the years that it creates much more value, even for the artist though great feedback, donations, a large community/fanbase, loyalty and viral marketing. Our job is to make the artists understand that, and we have 10,000 of them on the platform now that do,” Sylvain added.

Sylvain told us that punishing downloaders will only alienate artists from their fanbase and make them less popular. “Maybe we have to help amplify that backslash, and make it the accepted standard to put your music online for free and monetize other revenue streams, such as concerts, music licensing, Jamendo PRO etc.”

Visitors to torrent sites will be aware that Jamendo artist torrents are appearing there more and more. We asked Sylvain if this is helping Jamendo to grow.

“Yes we have partnerships with Mininova, isoHunt and Vuze among others, and yes they did help us grow a bit,” he said. “I think what’s also important is the service for the artists, it is one of our advantages compared to competitors. We offer the artists that upload on Jamendo a very large reach, mainly via these partners.”

As torrent sites struggle to be accepted as a legitimate platform for media distribution, Sylvain feels that a relationship with Jamendo can be a reciprocal one.

“Through our partnerships, we also help them prove that their torrent websites can be used for legal content, so it’s win-win for everyone,” Sylvain told us.

All downloads on Jamendo are completely free for everyone, but users are encouraged to support any of the bands if they like what they hear. The Pro package on the other hand is interesting for owners of bars, restaurant and other public spaces. They avoid paying the traditional royalties and the money goes directly to the artists.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

One of these new developments has been the addition of increasing numbers of Creative Commons (CC) licensed material. Creative Commons media is licensed by the creator, to be shared – usually with some restrictions – and is the same license used by TorrentFreak. It’s not a niche license, instead it is becoming increasingly popular, with Nine Inch Nails having released their Ghosts album under a CC license earlier this year.

With this is mind, isoHunt has announced a partnership with Jamendo, a site that deals in Creative Commons licensed music. Reaching the 10,000 album milestone only days ago, content available on Jamendo is growing quickly and when you grow, it helps to be able to get the content out there. This is why isoHunt decided to partner with several BitTorrent sites. isoHunt’s owner, Gary Fung, has been a long time supporter of Creative Commons and public domain works, and has stated that there is a strong future in Creative Commons material at isoHunt.

Laurent Kratz, CEO of Jamendo told TorrentFreak “Jamendo uses the Creative Commons licensing scheme to keep the rules very straight forward : copy as much as you can eat, the artist, the right-holders are ok. The new thing about partnering with a torrent portal like isoHunt, is that Jamendo has started an editorial work on top.”

“We receive up to 500 new albums per week, from more than 60 countries in the world,” Kratz said. “In order to maximize the interest of millions using torrent search engines every day, it was critical to only highlight a subset of all the albums we receive every day. It’s not about discriminating one band from another, it’s about getting anonymous BitTorrent fans to Jamendo, and discovering unsigned bands from everywhere in the world.”

Jamendo is also partnering with SumoTorrent, and torrent.to, and has been experimenting with mininova. In addition, their torrents are also available through Vuze. What better way to “stick it to the **AA” as so many of our commenters put it, than to ignore their memberships product, and use sites like this instead.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Jamendo has a great look and the site is easy to navigate. It supports tagging, playlists, album blogging and all the other features a “social” music sharing community needs. The site continues to grow and they recently received a significant amount of funding from Mangrove Capital Partners, the same people who supported Skype in its early days. With this funding, they plan improve the site and introduce new features.

David Waroquier, of Mangrove Capital Partners said in a response: “With the aim at becoming the biggest independent music portal online, we believe Jamendo is the most appropriate and flexible answer to the current online revolution that the music industry is facing: providing unsigned artists with revenue opportunities all the while enabling the users to listen and download music for free”, said .

Laurent Kratz Founder and CEO of Jamendo was of course very satisfied with the first round of funding they closed and commented: “With this funding, we plan to become the undisputed global player of free music. We are economically supporting and promoting the long tail of music. We have a proven business model where music is not only proposed for free to end consumers but we are also closing an increasing number of partnership agreements and licensing deals.”

All albums are available in MP3 (~200Kbps) and Ogg Vorbis (300Kbps) format, and can be downloaded with your favorite BitTorrent client or Emule. A great initiative that benefits both the artist and the fans, that’s how it’s supposed to be.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

“ISPs often advertise music as a benefit of signing up to their service, but facilitate the illegal swapping on copyright infringing music on a grand scale.”

It’s kind of a strange statement, what is copyright infringing music anyway? As far as I know music in itself cannot infringe copyright. Apart from this (and other speling errors), their point just doesn’t make any sense. Sure, ISPs advertise their high speed connection with phrases like “download as much music as you want”, but they never say “download as much copyrighted music as you want”. I guess the IFPI doesn’t know that there are plenty of legal services available where you can download music for free, such as Jamendo.

To make it even more funny, the IFPI also takes on The Pirate Bay by stating:

“Pirate Bay, one of the flagships of the anti-copyright movement, makes thousands of euros from advertising on its site, while maintaining its anti-establishment “free music” rhetoric.”

First of all, they probably mean advertisements, but even then their statement doesn’t make sense. Sure, The Pirate Bay generates revenue from the ads on their site, but most of it is used to pay the 20+ servers they need to keep the site up and running and the bandwidth bills. And even if they were millionaires, that doesn’t make the music less free does it?.

Those are not the only “inconvenient truths” that don’t make sense, there are a whole bunch of them. The “truth” that piracy doesn’t create jobs, tax revenues and economic growth for example, as far as I know it does. What about all the high speed internet connections pirates use, those are not free. Or iPods, harddrives, CDs and DVDs pirates use to store all their pirated stuff? There are plenty examples I can come up with that show that piracy is creating a lot of Jobs, tax revenues, and even economic growth.

The only thing that’s inconvenient about the inconvenient truths summed up by the IFPI is the fact that they’re not true.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

All albums are Creative Commons licensed, and available in MP3 (~200Kbps) and Ogg Vorbis (300Kbps) format. They can be downloaded with your favorite BitTorrent client and Emule.

Jamendo has more great features. You can share albums you like on your blog, write a review, or make a donation to support your favorite artist. Some artists already promised to include a list of supporters in the booklet of their forthcoming albums. Both artists and music fans will profit from this model. Everybody wins, except for the big record companies of course.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

If you find an album that you like, you can share it on your blog, write a review, or donate directly to the artist. Some artists will even include the list of people who donated in the booklet of their forthcoming albums. A great site for both artists and fans. Everybody wins, except for the big record labels of course.

The albums on Jamendo are available in MP3 (~200Kbps) and Ogg Vorbis (300Kbps), and can be downloaded with your favorite BitTorrent client or Emule.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Jamendo is still growing and has a lot of potential. The great thing is that both the artist and the public profit from this concept. The artists have a great platform to publish their music, an easy way to make their work available to a lot of people. Users on the other hand can download, remix and share music for free through our beloved BitTorrent.

And if you really like an album you have the option to directly donate to the artist. Everybody wins, except for the big record labels of course, initiatives like this could be “the final nail in the music industry coffin”. The music industry needs a drastic change.

check it out

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.