And it’s all LEGAL.
Jamendo is a community website of musicians who have made their albums free for listening and download under the Creative Commons license. The site is based in France and boasts (currently – the numbers are growing) over 59,000 album tracks in over 4,800 albums of just about every style of music, including many kinds this uncultured boy has never heard of. I think its really interesting and addictive, so here’s a writeup for anyone interested.
Cost: $0, or voluntary donation to the artist(s)
Requirements: filesharing software to handle torrent files (uTorrent, aMule, Azureus, BitTorrent, etc)
At the main page, you are presented with three choice boxes – 1 is a sort of FAQ, 2 is titled “Listen” and is filled with a shortlist of style tags, and the third box lets you register. There is no registration required, and is only necessary if you want to create your own on-site playlists or if you are a musician wanting to join the action. So, skipping right to ‘how it works’, let’s select the “Rock” tag.
You now are on a page of albums with the Rock tag, and clicking on each album will give you a page summarizing the album and showing tracks. However, I found that clicking on the track doesn’t open the ‘Jamendo Player’ and play the song, perhaps due to my setup – I get a dialog box that asks how I want to export an M3U playlist. (Maybe because I’m using Firefox?) Back on the Albums page, you will notice that as you mouse over each album, a small tooltip sidebar opens with the options to Download, Listen, Star, Review/Blog or Tell A Friend. I found Listen doesn’t go for me here either. So, this is how I got around it for those having the same issue:
At the top of any Jamendo page, click on ‘Open the Jamendo Player’. You’ll get a tidy popup box with play controls at the top and a left column of options – choose “Jamendo Library”. This will list every available artist in the database on the left, and selecting one displays their albums on the right and songs below. Now you can click on the little speaker beside each song and listen away. Peruse the main browser page of albums, then when you see one that you like, switch over to the Jamendo Player, scroll down to that artist and select the album from there. If you like what you hear, go back to the album page and select to download it.
The browser page will go dim and a popup will appear giving the options to download on BitTorrent or eMule (just click on BitTorrent if you have any torrent program). But before you click it, be sure to select below that whether you want .mp3 or .ogg file format. Next, your torrent program kicks in to handle the rest, and soon the music is all yours. Download speeds from Jamendo are usually lightning fast, too – on average over 400 kbps I’ve found.
Since the music is from a variety of countries and in a variety of languages, it can get confusing if you’re searching for English-language songs. In general, I found that if the album name is in English as well as the description, regardless of country of origin, it’s probably sung in English or a mix. But a lot of the material is also instrumental, so this doesn’t matter.
There’s some damn good music to be had from here. Check it out and enjoy.
