Jamendo.com: A Great Spot for Free Music of All Genres

In past articles (here and here), I've highlighted some great places where you can get free music off the Internet, such as archive.org, which offers thousands of concerts available completely without charge. One of the websites I mentioned is called Jamendo.com, and I recently revisited the site and think it's worthy of even more attention.

Jamendo.com is - along with Magnatune.com - one of the first music websites to truly embrace the open source ideals. With open source software, anyone is allowed to take your work, modify it and then redistribute it. While not exactly the same with Jamendo.com, it truly is the first of what I would call donation-ware. Download the music, listen to it, and if you decide you like it enough to pay for it, make a donation. If you don't, no big deal.

I know what you're thinking, because I had the same thoughts. Is there anything good on Jamendo.com, or is it all a bunch of junk? Is the music professionally recorded, or is it some group of high school kids with one microphone in the garage? While I can't speak to the quality of the recording setup, I can attest to the fact that of the music I've downloaded, almost all has sounded excellent, and while the quality of the performances vary (of course), overall I am very impressed.

Jamendo.com provides a few ways to access music. First is via the Jamendo player, which has a very similar feel to iTunes and other music players, as you can see from the screen shot. Clicking to listen to a song from within the player will start that song or album streaming. This is a great way to try out the music, before actually downloading the album to your computer's hard drive.

If you decide you like the music enough to download it, make a note of the performer and album, and do a quick search. The Jamendo.com search box - like Google's suggest while you type search feature - provides an ever-changing list of search results. Searching for "speech," for instance, returns results from bands with Speech in the name, or as a part of an album title.