Free Music Resource: Jamendo

Jamendo is a site that offers free access to music that has been published with Creative Commons licences. For more information on Creative Commons (since it's really beyond the scope of this blog), please see the Creative Commons website; for the purpose of Jamendo, all you really need to know is that it allows you to download as much music as you want, freely and legally.

I find the entire interface and design of the Jamendo website to be very intuitive and user-friendly. Clicking on the Music tab yields a list of albums with thumbnails of the cover art; these albums can be sorted in a variety of ways, including popularity (overall, monthly, or weekly), latest releases, most downloaded, most listened to, and others. A list of tags on the right can be used to narrow down the list of albums; you can also search for tags if you don't see what you're looking for in the list. A general-purpose search box is also available; this will search through just about any text associated with an artist, album, or song and can be very useful if you are otherwise unable to find what you are looking for. Finally, a music player is available to listen to songs directly on the web page without having to download anything; I have found myself using the player to preview a track or 2 from an album, and if I like what I hear I just download the whole album. The entire website is also available in both French and English.

Everything I have described in the last paragraph should be availalble to anyone who visits Jamendo. Those who choose to register (for free) will also receive some additional benefits, including the ability to create playlists and select their favourite albums. The FAQ also makes mention of "additional services" for members, which will be announced in the coming weeks.

I have been actively using Jamendo for about a week now and have already been able to discover a ton of great music, which I will certainly be featuring on this blog as soon as I can find some words to write about it. In the meantime, why not head on over to Jamendo and begin discovering what it has to offer. If you come across any really great finds, please leave a comment here so that all of this blog's readers can check them out too.

Happy listening!

URLs:
http://www.jamendo.com/
http://creativecommons.org/
http://www.jamendo.com/en/faq