Site: Jamendo.com
Summary: Interesting idea, but problems make this a place to avoid.
Jamendo.com is a European based site that describes itself as: “Jamendo is a community of free, legal and unlimited music published under Creative Commons licenses. Share your music, download your favorite artists!”
Their goal seems to be to find new and unsigned artists, and have them upload their music under a Creative Commons license. While there does seem to be a listener community, the main purpose of the site is to then sell low cost access to all the CC music they’ve collected to commercial businesses to use a background music. The profits from this are shared with the artists.
Interesting idea, but it has some serious issues. First, if you are a member of a Performance Rights Organization (PRO, such as BMI or ASCAP), Jamendo.com won’t even let you upload your music. There are apparently some legal issues with PROs and the Creative Commons license. See, for example, ASCAP’s essay: “Common Understanding: 10 Things Every Music Creator Should Know About Creative Commons Licensing”, and the CC response: “Commons Misunderstandings: ASCAP on Creative Commons“.
But given that many, if not most, serious artists will eventually join a PRO such as BMI, ASCAP, or SESAC, this presents a major issue when deciding if you want to use Jamendo.com.
And there seems to be another issue. The site faced severe financial problems at the end of 2009, and in early 2010 found a major investor. The fallout from that is still unclear. But as part of that reorganization, I investigated the benefits of the site for Ivory Drive, and the results were disturbing.
First, of course, I encountered the PRO vs. CC issue. Since Ivory Drive belongs to ASCAP, that seemed to be the end of it. But what was very disturbing was the spam generated. Within a day of setting up an account, it was flooded with bogus friend requests and private porn messages. Clearly, the site is out of control. In the many different sites that Ivory Drive has joined, this is the first time that anything like this has happened.
So for now, I must give Jamendo.com a big thumbs down. It was a waste of time, and had no real obvious benefits.
