Jamendo is a music website and an open community of independent artists and music lovers. It bills itself as "the world's largest digital service for free music".
Since the beginning in 2005, Jamendo's music has been licensed under Creative Commons licenses. Applied to all songs, these licenses allow artists to publish their music and preserve their rights while providing users the freedom to download it for free and redistribute at least non-commercially, with other permissions varying by license. The goal of Jamendo is to be the link between artists who want to share their music and audiences around the world, both private and professional.
Jamendo offers artists the opportunity to publish their music for free under Creative Commons licenses (and also the Free Art License in the past). Artists joining Jamendo cannot be registered to any collecting rights society, such as GEMA in Germany or SGAE in Spain, as such organizations are often holding exclusive rights on artists' works. More flexibility is observed in other collecting societies, recognizing music under Creative Commons licenses as long as commercial use is excluded. This is notably the case for SACEM in France. In the United States, ASCAP and BMI even recognize the use of Jamendo by their registered artists.
Each artist has a profile displaying uploaded albums and singles, along with artist information. These profiles are managed by the artist, with access to various features and tools like stats, notifications about interaction with the music, fan messaging, blogging, etc. They also have other built-in promotional tools at their disposal, like generated widgets and social media sharing buttons (for Facebook, Twitter, Google+). Lastly, artists can receive donations directly from Jamendo users.
