Jamendo is a great place for artists to publish their creative works and make it available to a wide audience. Users of the site can download these albums for free and donate directly to the artist if they like what they hear. Jamendo uses BitTorrent (what else) to distribute the albums, and there is also an on-site player so you can listen to the album before you download it.
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.
