Jamendo, a music sharing service which originally launched more than two years ago in 2006, and has maintained a firm ideal of free-to-download and free-to-listen media consumption, earlier this week announced its having massed a catalogue 10,000 albums strong. This news follows the website’s recognition in March 2007 of 1.5 million downloads from its Creative Commons-bound collection.
The site is pursuing still larger goals, too. Ben Jones of TorrentFreak tipped his hat today to word delivered by the peer-to-peer site isoHunt earlier this month that all songs published via Jamendo have been made available to isoHunt users.
While 10,000 albums, or roughly 150,000 songs, may seem a relatively small number when compared to what the broader music industry holds in its archives, Jamendo’s ability to build a supply of Creative Commons material of a substantive quantity is revealing of the desire of a sizable base of musicians to champion the distribution of tracks by way of more liberal methods than traditional copyright holders have legally allowed on the Web thus far. Not to mention free distribution.