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.

Top Five Songs on Jamendo Pro

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.

• 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.

Northern Star on Ultrastar Deluxe

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.

Apple TV latest info on Engadget

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.

It seems that the training department and the marketing department had gotten their schedules mixed up. The training DVDs were ready to ship, but the demo content had not been cleared for such a use, so Apple staff turned to the internets, searching for unsigned artists with open licenses on their music, who would consent to being included on the training DVD. Apple found my music on Jamendo. I’m assuming I’m not the only Jamendo artist they contacted that day.

My music happens to be available through iTunes. But it was not iTunes which brought me to Apple’s attention. It was Jamendo. A small, French, Bittorrent-based, Creative Commons licensed music community.

I was told that my music was a good fit for the project, and asked to participate. I promptly and politely replied, asking how many DVDs would be distributed and whether I could receive a copy. But they never responded.

Not including poor communication skills, I came up with a couple of theories why I never heard back from Apple:

1. At the final hour, the marketing department got their act together
2. My requests indicated that I was wary of contributing, and too much hassle to deal with.
3. Apple did include my music, without my permission, and without informing me that they would actually do so, beyond an initial inquiry.

So I’d love to know. Who else heard from Apple on February 14th? And does anyone out there have the Apple TV Training DVD? Because I’d love to see it, or at least know what music ended up on the disc.

But whether or not I ever hear anything more about the Training DVD, this amusing episode gave me some additional insight into Apple and their media empire. Exactly one week before, Steve Jobs posted his Thoughts on Music wherein he, disingenuously, I believe, claimed that he was opposed to DRM. Apple, it seems is aware of all the alternative sources for music out there. And we’re not just talking Zune. We’re talking Jamendo, Magnatune and all of the other Creative Commons and public domain artists.

It also suggests that copyright and DRM are serious impediments, not only to consumers and artists, but to the very businesses which are built on proprietary software and strict intellectual property controls. And because of this, those of us who create and support open licenses stand to benefit — not just artistically, but perhaps financially as well.