duggup

Redhat are one of the biggies in the Linux market and have a great little magazine, in the current issue they have a rather spiffy chat with Laurent Kratz, the CEO and co-founder of Jamendo, it’s titled Jamendo: Music the way it was meant to be and it wasn’t the sort of thing I expected to find in a magazine about Linux… wierd but it does make a sort of sense as Red Hat sell an Open Source operating system and Creative Commons is about “open source music”.

Creative Commons licenses showed up about four years ago and so did a whole new category of music. In the beginning, it wasn’t really easy to find and a lot of it wasn’t very good. Roll forward to 2006… Creative Commons licensing is on a roll, MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats, streaming audio for low-fi and peer-to-peer delivery for hi-fi, a web site in multiple languages and well here is one of my favourite bits

“We use BitTorrent and eMule (ed2k and Kadmelia) networks as the core technology to distribute more than 1,600 complete albums, at very low cost. We’ve delivered at least 1 million copies this year to date. Artists upload 5 to 10 new albums per day.”

That’s right folks he said “One million albums this year”. Now that’s a lot of music and sure you aren’t going to find Pink Floyd in their song-list, but as we have shown over the last few months that for small band trying to get themselves heard by an audience (one that isn’t just the family and friends), releasing a few songs under a Creative Commons license isn’t a bad thing. Currently they have 1670 published albums on their site. Jamendo aren’t the only people spreading CC music this way but because of the strong European support Jamendo is way out in front .

Jamendo also allows artists to take donation-style payments for their work, “Jamendo also handles PayPal(R) accounts for the artists. Listeners, if they want to support the artists, pay a minimum amount of five euros, Jamendo only keeps a fixed amount (about 50c US), whatever the amount paid by the donor. The money is transferred to the artist once 100 euros are reached.”

As some of you will have noticed, I am a big fan of Jamendo and use them a lot. Read the interview, it gives a bit of insight into where a lot of the music you hear on duggup comes from.

Don’t forget to check out Jamendo as well. Click on anything and enjoy the surprise. (for example I just opened another window went to the site and found www.jamendo.com/en/album/3000/ and it wasn’t too bad). Tell us all if you find something interesting.

thatch is fascinated by guitars, music, guitars, production, silly noises, guitars and used to be a musician. Did I mention the thing about the guitars?
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