Monday, June 21, 2010

Music You Can Freely Use in Podcasts and Videos

Online music repository Jamendo has a wealth of Creative Commons-licensed music. Listening to a few tracks, I found the mix to be quite good. There are quite a few gems (listen to Legendary). About 1500 albums are on the site with the number increasing exponentially (illustrated below). Conveniently, you can download albums through Bittorrent or eMule. If you hear songs in French, don't be surprised since Jamendo was French-founded. Based on tag size and my own random sampling, electronica seems to dominate with rock, pop, and ambient a few steps behind. There's also some good relaxing music you can use to cool down at the end of the day.

Jamendo is a great resource if you want to add a track to your podcast or video you want to upload to Youtube. For one thing, you aren't going to be sued by the RIAA or have your video taken down. I've bookmarked several videos on Youtube that mysteriously vanished when I tried to go back to watch them again.

Overall, it's an awesome resource for remixing and sharing music and represents an interesting model for distributing music by bringing P2P and open licensing together. While studio released music is nice in its uniformity, Jamendo offers a nice way to access the long tail of music.