blog @ stevendunston.com

Jamendo has been on a roll lately, expanding their offerings to artists and building services around the core of quality Creative Commons music that they have established.

With their professional music licensing, Jamendo is taking unsigned, Creative Commons artists into new markets.

Just in the last couple of months, my music has been used in a video in Vancouver BC, a film in Sweden, aboard French High Speed Rail, and now comes loaded on the latest mp3 player from Archos.

The icing on the cake is that one of my tracks, Move A Little Closer, is currently one of the top 5 tracks in sales on Jamendo Pro. I don’t know exactly what that means yet in terms of dollars, but Jamendo promises to pay 50% of revenue directly back to the artists. Not bad for music that I planned to give away.

From time to time I’ll be posting my playlist. Most of it will be free music, freely available as downloadable mp3 files, flac files, etc. Occasionally I’ll include an independent band or small-label band worth listening to. Today’s music:

• Jamendo Ambient Mix
• Drive-By Truckers (available on emusic.com)
• Tim Fite’s free album, “Over the Counter Culture”

Jamendo’s album count keeps going up, and the quality of the music keeps improving as well. I’m loving the tag-based streaming player built into the web browser. One can also stream music with Pandora, or Last.fm, but with Jamendo, if you find something you love, it’s easy and free to download it immediately.

The Drive-by Truckers are classified as Alternative Country on emusic.com, but as several reviewers have pointed out, they are perhaps better referred to as Southern Rock.

Tim Fite is clever, bitingly sarcastic, and bouncy. It’s definitely hip-hop, also country, Texan, and scathingly political. I’m a fan of bargain-bin-diving djs, hunting for wacky samples. Tim Fite has taken this technique to a new plateau.

Not sure how they found me, probably through Jamendo. But it’s very cool to have my song included with the open source competitive karaoke sensation that is Ultrastar Deluxe. For those who are unfamiliar with it, it’s a free program that tracks your voice as you sing along with songs, and then gives you a score based on how well you follow the original.

This is the perfect example of why I release my music under a Creative Commons license. They even have a link to my Jamendo album on their front page. Sweet.

According to Apple’s marketing campaign, if it’s on iTunes, it’s on the Apple TV. That may be true for Apple’s early adopters who plopped down $299 for the privilege of porting their media from their computer to their television. But it wasn’t true for Apple’s Global Sales Training Department, which frantically contacted me about a month ago, seeking to use my music for the launch of their Apple TV Sales Training DVD.

Continue reading