Due to my laptop being dead I am not behind my regular desktop and thus not seeing the statistics what I have listened to the most in the past weeks. So I will take this oportunity to reflect on what I dislike on Jamendo. There is not much, and its mostly just annoyances, but it is only fair to say it out loud and hope things improve.
For starters, I dislike the Flash player. There less volatile and more open technologies out there – e.g. The Yahoo! Media Player that is also being used by BlocSonic seems to be written in JavaScript/EcmaScript and feels nicer to me. I am even thinking of implementing it on my page.
The OGG/Vorbis torrents are sometimes seedless, which makes it sometimes a bit of a drag to wait days or even weeks for an album to finally download.
Already after my first TGJE report mareviq suggested to me Rob Costlow – a great pianist who offers his music under a CC license. Sadly though, his music can be heard on Jamendo, but not downloaded. After I contacted Jamendo with that problem, they responded that Rob Costlow is an exception. As someone who does have some idea of IP law, I find this really odd. Considering Rob Costlow has published his works under a CC BY-NC-SA license at least on Magnatune, it should not have been any problem with anyone who got the music legally to share it with others.
But even graver then the above case is HYPE – a french band whose music is not available on Jamendo anymore at all. From what I could gather from e-mailing Jamendo, is that HYPE got a record deal and the label gave the band an ultimatum to get all their free music offline. If anything, this looks like a school example of a copyright violation. Sure, an artist has a right to revoke his work under certain conditions, but a better commercial exploitation is hardly one of them. Again, since they (most probably) had their work on Jamendo under a CC license, it is a violation from their part to take back the rights that they already gave away to the public.
This brings me to free singles of non-free albums – lately I have found a lot of singles on Jamendo and when looking at the artists' sites I usually found out they have full albums released as CD's and nowhere any notice of any CC. Quite a lot of these I found were promoted by Open Music Wire. After looking at the Open Music Wire website it seems to me that in some cases both Open Music Wire's and in turn also Jamendo's services are being misused for promoting non-free labels and artists, by CC'ing just one track. This gives me very mixed feelings. On the one hand it does promote some lesser known artists. But on the other hand, it (ab)uses free services to tease people into buying non-free content. Moreover since CC is not mentioned anywhere on the artists' homepages, I wonder what would happen if, e.g. a user would get sued for copyright infringement of a track that is under a strict copyright on the CD, yet freely available under a CC license on Jamendo or Open Music Wire.
In other news: Since I started this experiment I have listened almost exclusively music from Jamendo. This will probably change a bit in the future, not because there is much wrong with Jamendo, but just because after proving that one can survive for a month of listening only to music served by Jamendo, I will go on with a normal life and expand TGJE over other free netlables non-discriminatory. This way I will try to make a user case of a normal, internet-savvy music lover.
hook out → listening to Jamendo Radio on my dad's laptop and slowly going to bed