When I discover something great, new on the web that has been around for a while, I always feel this weird combination of pleasure and shock. First: “Wow, this is great!” Then: “Why did I not find out about this sooner?! Damnit, I’m supposed to know this stuff!” (Occasionally followed by: “I should blog about this!” 😉

Jamendo is an example. It’s a multilingual web 2.0 style music-sharing community with an emphasis on copyright licenses which are at least free as in beer. Some are also free as in speech. You can browse the available music by genre and license, and download or stream the tracks you want. BitTorrent is supported, though I haven’t seen any mega-size torrents yet (it would be neat to download an entire genre). It’s got everything else you could want: RSS feeds, discussion & review boards for each album, prominent donation links, cover images ..

The reason I hadn’t heard about is that its largest community is French-speaking. But Jamendo is multilingual, so it seems only a matter of time until the other languages catch up. The site seems to be a bit buggy at times, but reloading usually does the trick for me. Now I’ve got lots of new music to explore ..