The new design, which went live almost a week ago, contains very little information about the licenses used, making it all but impossible for site users to comply with them.

Creative Commons is a widely used (including by TorrentFreak) licence system that gives artists/creators the ability to grant permissions for reuse.

The terms are specified in the license, and have become an internet standard in many ways. Yet without an easy way to tell which of the licenses is being used, it causes problems for reuse and distribution – the entire point of both the license, and Jamendo.

Worse, since the work’s license is not being displayed adequately (as described in Creative Common’s guide to marking content) Jamendo may be in breach of the Creative Commons license themselves.

Creative Commons told us that it was not ideal, and that they will be reaching out to Jamendo to fix things and make licensing clearer.

Morgane Dourthe, Sales Team Leader at Jamendo told TorrentFreak “This new version of Jamendo is a first release and a lot things still needs to be improved and modified.” They added that they would be discussing many points this week, and that this would be among them.

For the sake of clarity and compliance, for both artists and users, the sooner the better.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Fast forward to today and Jamendo features work from 38,000 artists from all around the world, who together have published 315,000 tracks across 50,000 albums spanning a wide range of genres. Impressive statistics that easily beat some established record labels.

Jamendo is also one of the early advocates of using BitTorrent to share free music. According to Jamendo’s co-founder Pierre Gérard, one of the main reasons to support P2P technology was because the artists thought that it was a good platform to promote their work.

“We were one of the first platforms to provide legal music torrents because the artists on Jamendo wanted to use the P2P networks to share their music and have it discovered. At the beginning it was also a very good solution, very reliable and economical,” Pierre Gérard told TorrentFreak

Even today where bandwidth is relatively cheap Jamendo continues to support BitTorrent downloads, in both OGG and MP3 format for most artists. However, the seeding is no longer taken care of by Jamando, but by artists and fans.

Initiatives like Jamendo offer some much-needed counterbalance to critics who say that there’s virtually no ‘legal’ content on BitTorrent. Jamendo’s artists happily publish their work on all major BitTorrent sites and 315,000 tracks doesn’t appear to be an insignificant amount to us.

Jamendo doesn’t see itself as direct competition to the major record labels, but rather a proponent of a new music industry that empowers artists who share their music freely under a Creative Commons license.

“We are a new opportunity for a new generation of artists, we provide new tools and a new legal framework. Every day, new artists are joining Jamendo. We want to be part of a new organisation of the music distribution where the artists have the choice and can decide how they want to be diffused,” Pierre Gérard said.

Besides from offering a publishing platform, Jamendo also allows users to review albums and to donate directly to the artists if they like what they hear. For some of the popular artists this is a nice tip, but the real value of Jamendo comes from the exposure to thousands of potential fans.

“Jamendo is not American Idol, the promise is not to become a star with Jamendo, we prefer to have thousands of artists who can get new fans, share their music and sometimes make some money. The most popular artists on Jamendo have millions of listens, this is the best rewards they can get.”

Unlike many major labels, Jamendo puts the interests of the artists first, helping them to escape obscurity and be heard by a community of more than 1,000,000 avid music fans. So next time you hear the RIAA or IFPI complaining how BitTorrent ruins the lives of artists, remember that there are tens of thousands of musicians who disagree.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

All of the MP3s are still freely available for download on the festival’s site, so it only takes one person to get a torrent up and running. For the past three years Ben Stolt has taken the time and effort to put all the MP3s into one big torrent, and this week the first torrent containing 792 tracks has been released.

The 4.49 gigabyte torrent will likely be followed by another release later this month or early March.

Every year the SXSW torrents are a great success, with many thousands of music aficionados downloading the gigabytes of free music from both established acts and upcoming bands in virtually every music genre. In total, the torrents of the previous editions have been downloaded close to 150,000 times.

Although all tracks can also be streamed and downloaded directly from the festival website, a big torrent makes more sense since it’s easier than laboriously downloading every MP3 separately. In addition, using BitTorrent saves SXSW some money in bandwidth costs. The good news is that, for once, the RIAA isn’t watching over your shoulder when downloading music

This year’s SXSW music festival takes place from March 16-20 in Austin Texas. All the tracks released for the previous editions are also still available for those people who want to fill up their iPod without having to invest thousands of dollars.

For those interested in even more free music to fill up their MP3-players, there’s always Jamendo with nearly 50,000 free-to-download albums, also supported by BitTorrent. That’s a few Terabytes of free music, good for 5 years of continuous play.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Thus far there are only a handful of Apps listed in the official store and not all of them are equally usable. To stimulate the development of uTorrent Apps, BitTorrent Inc. started a developers challenge in August, awarding a $1000 prize to the best App to be submitted. Today the winner was announced.

The winning App is called Zulu Music and was developed by Steven Viola. The HTML and Javascript-based App enables users to search for and discover new artists among the 39,229 free albums that are currently available on the music sharing site Jamendo. All albums can be downloaded directly in uTorrent in high quality MP3 and OGG formats.

Zulu Music is a prime example of how free and legal content can be embedded in uTorrent. However, the developer of the App also released another, very similar App that might be of greater use to the average BitTorrent user – Zulu TV.

Zulu TV offers uTorrent users an easy way to find the latest TV-shows, without having to visit a torrent site. The App pulls torrents from EZTV and uses artwork published by TheTVDB and combines them into a nifty TV-torrent guide. With a single click users can subscribe to shows or download individual episodes.

Unlike with Zulu Music, not all copyright holders have given permission to download the content that’s linked to on Zulu TV, and this is most likely the reason why the App has not been given a mention by BitTorrent Inc. People who are interested in trying the App can add it to uTorrent manually by going to the developer’s site.

A third App that came out today is released in collaboration with the organization that hosts the TED conferences. This App enables users to browse through and download high quality copies of all the latest 18-minute TED talks.

“We’re thrilled to collaborate with BitTorrent to bring TEDTalks to millions of new viewers,” June Cohen, Executive Producer of TED Media said. “TED’s mission is to spread ideas, and BitTorrent’s new apps platform will amplify our work really powerfully, reaching a large and engaged audience who may be new to TED.”

A representative from EZTV informed TorrentFreak that he was thrilled about Zulu TV as well, but thus far he hasn’t heard anything from BitTorrent Inc. yet.

“EZTV’s mission is to spread TV-shows, and BitTorrent’s new apps platform will amplify our work really powerfully, reaching a large and engaged audience who may be new to EZTV,” we were told.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

“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.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.