Save Jamendo

Jamendo is a community of free, legal and unlimited music published under Creative Commons licenses. It is a site where you can share your music, and freely download albums that appeal to you.

Jamendo was a discovery in the Summer of 2008 when I heard about it from a music-lover. Since then I have found much beautiful music, begun to write reviews and become part of a music community of artists and reviewers. Recently I uploaded a short album of poems, two of which had songs from albums musicians were offering through Jamendo and have been delighted and inspired by the support of this community.

I don't know how the owner and managers of Jamendo have done it, but they have created a site that is a creative symphony in itself.

Not just the music, but much of the writing I've seen at Jamendo is superlative.

Jamendo is not just another music site. It is grounded in a fair ethic towards artists, and has enabled a mutually supportive and strong music community to develop and flourish.

Jamendo's only been in existence about 8 years, and profits from licensed music is growing, as is revenue from the 'stores' artists can opt to offer along with their music. A second round of capital has not materialized. Jamendo is just beginning to fly, to really take off it needs backers.

Without solid commitment from its previous backers, and in need of two million dollars to survive at this juncture, Jamendo will disappear.


We, the users of this beautiful site, can make a difference. Let our voices be heard. Many of us are willing to pay a small yearly subscription to maintain Jamendo so that there can be continuance, so that our musical arts can flourish amidst a changing global economic model.

Let it be clear: we do not want to lose Jamendo.

News article on Jamendo from digitalmediawire, Jan 7th:

Free, Licensed Music Download Service Jamendo Seeks Buyer

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on January 7, 2010 - 8:33am.

Luxembourg - Jamendo, the provider of a website featuring free music downloads, published via Creative Commons licenses, is actively seeking a sale or merger of the company and has held talks with at least one suitor, TechCrunch reported.

Founded in 2000, Luxembourg-based Jamendo last raised funding in June 2007 from Mangrove Capital Partners, but has since failed in its attempts to raise a $2.15 million follow-up round.

Along with free downloads, Jamendo also operates an online marketplace where music may be licensed for use in multimedia projects, and as background music.

The company told TechCrunch the service counts 2,300 paying customers, and generated about $430,000 in 2009.

                                                    

Response to an Album: 'Punxsutawney' by Bielebny

Kinesthia: awareness of position, weight, tension and movement.

Rarely have I found a music whose creativity is far enough out of the mainstrean, yet recognizably music never-the-less, experimental jazz, ambient, trance, electronic, triphop, funk, big band jazz, scratchy writings in intransigent notes running up and down my spine, sending messages through my central nervous system to get those bones off the chair and dance woman. I loved the quirky idiosyncratic moments of multiple musics that compose these tracks. They cohere, feel unified through rhythms that are based in the body, its creative movement. A theatrical quality at times, yet not the kind of dance music 'for performance' so much as music for the people's performance, for a dance crowd of creative spirits, people who write poetry with their bodies, who paint while they dance. Who are discovering who they are as they dance. You or me. Just like the music which is so varied that from one phrase to the next you don't know where it's going though there is a central rhythm holding each piece together and a more expansive one uniting the album. An exciting album of kinesthetic music. Bielebny has created a wholly social music of private creativities.

Bielebny Punxsutawney

This album was recommended to you by:    brendaclews

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Survival of Beauty

The unseeded seed, unflowered flower, is without consequence, easy, undiscovered, resting in the future.

Quiet in the husk, shell, unrooted, unopened. Genius of possibility, profound. Before the strength of the tendril, what opens, reaches, sensitivity, the grounding, earth, nourishment of soil. Or the unfurling of promise into stalks and leaves and fragrant colour of soft petals fertilized by bees, the wind.

In the flowering, my hands beside my face, fronds, follow the sun from dawn to mid-day to dusk, twisting stalk to drink the light. At night the head of petals rests. Or it rains, cup of petals communing.

In the flower, survival of beauty.

In the flowering, nourishing fruit ripening the future.

Detail from The Lady and the Chimera, 2010.

                                                    

Isabel Allende begins her novels on this day every year

I liked this so much from today's Writer's Almanac that I thought to post it. Isabel Allende is one of my favourite writers, though I can only read her in translation.

Today, writer Isabel Allende (books by this author) is starting a new book, just as she has been doing every single January 8th for the past 29 years. On January 8, 1981, when Chilean-born Allende was living in Venezuela and working as a school administrator and freelance journalist, she got a phone call that her beloved grandfather, at 99 years old, was dying. She started writing him a letter, and that letter turned into her very first novel, The House of the Spirits. She said, "It was such a lucky book from the very beginning, that I kept that lucky date to start."

Today is a sacred day for her, and she treats it in a ceremonial, ritualistic way. She gets up early this morning and goes alone to her office, where she lights candles "for the spirits and the muses." She surrounds herself with fresh flowers and incense, and she meditates.

She sits down at the computer, turns it on, and begins to write. She says: "I try to write the first sentence in a state of trance, as if somebody else was writing it through me. That first sentence usually determines the whole book. It's a door that opens into an unknown territory that I have to explore with my characters. And slowly as I write, the story seems to unfold itself, in spite of me."

She said, "When I start I am in a total limbo. I don't have any idea where the story is going or what is going to happen or why I am writing it." She doesn't use an outline, and she doesn't talk to anybody about what she's writing. She doesn't look back at what she's written until she's completed a whole first draft — which she then prints out, reads for the first time, and goes about the task of revising, where she really focuses on heightening and perfecting tension in the story and the tone and rhythm of the language.

She said that she take notes all the time and carries a notebook in her purse so that she can jot down interesting things she sees or hears. She clips articles out of newspapers, and when people tell her a story, she writes down that story. And then, when she is in the beginning stages of working on a book, she looks through all these things that she's collected and finds inspiration in them.

She writes in a room alone for 10 or 12 hours a day, usually Monday through Saturday from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. During this time, she says, "I don't talk to anybody; I don't answer the telephone. I'm just a medium or an instrument of something that is happening beyond me."

She's the author of nearly 20 books published since 1982, among them Paula (1995), Daughter of Fortune (1999), Portrait in Sepia (2000), and the recent memoir, The Sum of Our Days (2008). Her work has been translated into 30 languages, and her books have sold more than 51 million copies. She continues to write fiction in Spanish though she's lived in the United States for decades. Margaret Sayers Peden has done the English translations of several of Isabel Allende's books.