Friday, January 20, 2006

Excellent Silence on jamendo

I have been using jamendo for a couple of weeks and I am just amazed by the quality of music published through jamendo. For example, I discovered a Belgian group called Silence whose creations are simply superb. Now, I live in Belgium... Was there any chance whatsoever of me being exposed to their music through traditional media? My answer is no. So jamendo can also bring you Silence, or indeed perhaps the next "Sound of Silence", that media majors have missed simply because they cannot handle the amount of music being created ina world where the cost of creation is going down (I mean the cost of technical production and replication of creations, not the pain of the creator) and the cost of error is near zero.



In fact there is a big, a HUGE difference between jamendo and traditional ways of accessing music: with jamendo and thanks to their tagging system I ACTIVELY select my style. In fact, jamendo is very much one of those "life-style enablers", i.e. a tool helping me choose what suits me in a world of ABUNDANCE of CREATIONS and therefore SCARCITY OF ATTENTION. Another example would be Pandora (www.pandora.com). The way it is being done is considerably more powerful than older approaches to the web (profiling, permission marketing based on my selecting pre-formated categories, portals...) because it is based on the principles of an interactive, social, peer-to-peer web. In fact what we are seing is the emergence of a new way of organising the value system of the media & entertainment industry. And I think the debate around licenses and IP rights is in fact an economic war between competing channels of production and distribution, one established and costly and the other one disruptive, relatively inexpensive and fairer to creators. I personally believe these two ways of doing can be complementary and that the traditional value system will have to adapt practices and shed a few bad habits of the past.



Anyway, Silence is great if you like quiet electro music and I recommend it to you. Check it out on http://www.jamendo.com/be/artist/silence/.



3 comments:

  1. i would personally like to add a wonderful tagger which you and me know about but who might interest the community out there:
    http://www.pandora.com
    simply put, superb.
    r.

    ReplyDelete
  2. too fast on posting this time :)
    sorry for this.
    r.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey Alex,
    Thanks for introducing me to Jamendo and to Silence.
    -dg

    ReplyDelete