It’s been quite a journey. At last, everything is posted and is working properly: my new album, La vie sous la mer, is freely available in .mp3 or .ogg formats — and now, the tracker has finally started counting the downloads! As of this moment, the total stands at 32; I estimate there had to be at least 100 that went by in the first few days of its release, but weren’t counted.
It’s an imperfect world.
However, let me say this: no other site I have ever seen changes — and adds new features — as quickly as Jamendo. Recently, I blogged one of the news articles from the site; they reached the 5000 album mark the very day that my album came out. (For some other impressive stats, look here.)
That’s because they’re the best.
Sure, they have technical difficulties from time to time. What site doesn’t? But they always come back, and always solve the problem.
But that’s not their true strength. Fixing problems as they come up is not “swimming”, it’s just “treading water.” Jamendo goes much, much further . . . in creating and implementing new ideas.
For example, on certain other music sites, the artists and their works are ranked in “charts” (analogous to those [outdated] Billboard Top 20 charts). The only factor that goes into this is the number of times the album has been streamed or downloaded. That leads to abuse of the system: there are some folks who do nothing on the site except come in once a day and stream their own music, so it will go up in the rankings.
Clearly this is absurd, and defeats the point.
Watch how Jamendo solved this problem:
First, downloads and streams are only part of the visibility formula. There are several more factors that are equally important:
- Recommendations. Jamendo allows users to link up with ‘friends’ (people with similar musical taste). Any album recommendation goes out to this list of friends.
- Reviews. Any album can be streamed, but does movement by itself imply success? Certainly the folks who produce spam emails think so! However, you and I know that spam is quickly screened out, deleted, or ignored. Response is the key, not streams or downloads. To aid this, Jamendo not only allows reviews — the entire site is available in 26 different languages, to encourage participation by everyone, not just one group.
- Tags. Genres were created by the recording industry. True lovers of music know it is not so easy to classify their favorite artists. That’s why tags are important: it might be impossible to decide if, say, Derek’s album Wild and Free is progressive rock, jazz fusion, or instrumental hard rock. Fortunately, have a look at his page and you’ll see a cloud of “album tags” further down that connect this music to others that are similar.
- Favorites (starred albums). Finally, each user can keep a personal favorites list. Therefore, if you find an album you like, you can check the “Buzz Team” of an artist and check out the other users who have starred the album. In doing this, you have basically made the other users on the site part of a search algorithm for finding good music!
In the end, Jamendo doesn’t really use “ranks” as such, but “visibility” — similar albums end up grouped with similar albums, so that if you find one artist you like, you are typically only one click away from another you would like as well.
The factors above make sense if you realize that Jamendo has taken the concept of “popularity” out of the hands of the machines, the pure number crunchers, and returned it to the people. They have built a digital music network on top of a human network.
And that’s why I say: Jamendo is rising.
