fair music weblog

“Our bands wanted their songs to be on peer-to-peer-networks, although they are not Madonna or any other famous artist”, is the straightforward answer CEO gives when asked what his music service jamendo is about. jamendo, a French company that is based in Luxembourg, is a new model for artists to promote, publish, and be paid for their music.
The rules of jamendo are simple:

Artists, who want to distribute their music via jamendo, have to choose one of 6 Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow users to listen, copy, share, or burn the songs to an audio CD. Some allow as well remixing or using the (remixed) music for commercial purposes.

jamendo streams the music on their website in lo-fi and pushes the music into peer-to-peer-networks such as BitTorrent or eMule in hi-fi for download to legally distribute albums at near-zero cost. Artists and their music are promoted through this way. jamendo users can discover and share albums, but also review them or start a discussion on the forums. Albums are democratically rated based on the visitors’ reviews. If they fancy an artist they can support him by making a donation.

For financing jamendo sells moderate advertising space on the web pages and in the streamed music. Music downloads on P2P networks are guaranteed to be free of advertising. Half of the revenue that comes from advertising goes to the artists.

Does this really offer an income for the artists? Laurent Kratz: “Lots of the bands on jamendo are guys that are 30 or 35 years old, have a fulltime job and a salary. They make music for fun, it’s a hobby. But still they want to be recognised. So this offers them the possibility to get new contacts, meet people, make new friends. With the help of the money they are able to do a concert on the other side of France, buy fuel for the car or the like. It’s a sharing economy, behind the big money.”
jamendo does not have exclusive contracts with the artists, who are free to promote and distribute their music with all other means. Laurent Kratz is happy if they do and are successful, like the French band Lonah: “Lonah was really popular on jamendo. Their album was downloaded about 20.000 times in 3 or 4 month. Via friends on myspace they got in contact with a label and the label signed them.”

But Lonah, it seems, believe in the business model of jamendo. Their first album will stay under a Creative Commons license, for their second album they have a contract with the label for one year. Then the album will be released under a license of Creative Commons, who’s motto is: some rights reserved.