A little nod to Anarchy X, a Berlin-based electro pop/punk artist with a concept, who just uploaded to jamendo a tribute song to Michael Jackson.

You might like it, or not (a lot could probably be said about the artwork too); we just wanted to use this song as a testament to the fact that the jamendo community, as the free music community in general, was affected just like the rest of the world by the passing of the King of Pop.

This week, we are inviting you to chill out to the soft beats of Wasaru. 

Wasaru is a French artist from Tourcoing, right on the Belgian border. He mixes trip hop, electronica and classical music with a touch of samples from movie dialogues. Sometimes he even sings a little.

The result is atmospheric, melancholic and soulful stuff. Check it out!

The founder of jamendo and Jamendo PRO received the Creative Young Entrepeneur Luxembourg Award 2009.

Sylvain Zimmer received from the hands of Mr. Tom Theves, from the Ministry of Economy of Luxembourg, the Creative Young Entrepeneur Luxembourg (CYEL) award 2009. This award, granted by the Luxembourg branch of Junior Chamber International (JCI), distinguishes the country’s most creative entrepreneurs. It is given by a jury of entrepreneurs and innovation professionals from Luxembourg.

Sylvain was chosen among twelve candidates by JCI for this award. He received a prize in addition to the acknowledgment of his creative entrepreneurship. He launched Jamendo.com at the ripe age of 20 and then, a few years later, launched Jamendo PRO, designed for professionals looking for background music for public places or for audiovisual sychronization licenses for films, documentaries, ads, etc. Today, Jamendo PRO is experiencing a rapid growth of its income.

“I am thrilled by this recognition. Not only on a personal level, but for all the work accomplished by our team in the last year”, he says. The Young Entrepreneur 2009 will now be able to defend his innovative business model before an international jury and audience in November, at the JCI worldwide competition.

Congratulations Sylvain!

Let’s close the week with a press release we just issued. Jamendo, more present than ever, in every nook and cranny of the internet!
 

Jamendo is now available from the Moovida Media Center. Access over 21,000 albums by 9500 artists from all over the world, straight from your TV!

Moovida, the free and open source media center for Windows and Linux, has integrated Jamendo in its new interface. With the aggregation of Jamendo to its content catalog, Moovida gives a new dimension to the promotion of free culture: the 21,000 jamendo albums can from now on easily be browsed from a TV screen from your living room couch.

The partnership between Jamendo and Moovida stems from values both companies share: the commitment to innovation, free culture and discovery. Both companies liaised in order to further promote the free culture movement. “We have always been promoting open source software“, says Pierre Gérard, co-founder of jamendo. “Since the beginning, jamendo has been developed using free software. After the successes of Linux, Firefox or OpenOffice, Moovida and jamendo with Creative Commons are now new key actors in this movement.“

The jamendo plugin is pre-installed in Moovida, available for free download here.

Sadly, there aren’t that many Japanese artists on jamendo. Even less Japanese pop artists. Which is why we’re particularly happy to present you this week’s featured artist, who happens to be both of those: Secret Ocean. 

Secret Ocean is a newcomer on jamendo; he uploaded his album Kokoro No Furyoku just a few weeks ago. He sings in Japanese and a little in English too, with a definite western-style, acoustic singer-songwriter aesthetic. Consider this a kind of warm welcome to him…

From today, jamendo is available for free on the iPhone and iPod Touch! Two weeks after we launched the Android application, you can now listen to your favorite artists on Apple products too.

The Jamendo application for iPhone and iPod Touch gives you free access to jamendo’s 20,000 albums published under Creative Commons licenses.

Listen at any time to the most popular albums of the week, discover the latest releases and the best of jamendo on our Top 50. Jamendo’s five radio streams (electro, jazz, lounge, rock, metal and pop) are also directly accessible. Carry the best of jamendo in your pocket!

Logged-in jamendo members can also browse through their favorite albums and personal playlists. The application is available for free in English and French.

As we mentioned recently, jamendo has created a space where artists can sell collectors’ items to their fans. In these virtual shops, the most obvious things you can buy are special editions of their albums or high definition downloads. But some artists have gotten creative… Here are a few examples worth a look.

Want to learn to play Rob Costlow’s sweet melodies? Why not do it directly from his score sheets: Rob will let you do just that, at €12 for 4 sheets. At that price, piano buffs have no reason to hold back.

You might not play the piano, but surely you can appreciate the beauty of an elaborate image. Binary Mind is selling photomontages printed on canvas, with impressive colors and creative angles.

Even more creative is VS’s offer to perform in your living room! The band will come and play a semi-acoustic showcase just for you, for only €300 (plus travel expenses of course). An unforgettable experience for sure…

Finally, the quirkiness award goes to Sebkha-Chott, from whose virtual shop you can purchase, against €1500, a visit from the band’s bass player and infamous dictator Wladimir Ohrelianov. He will come over to your place and give a 4 minute speech. Now you don’t want to miss out on that…

As you can see, some artists are coming up with some pretty crazy stuff in their virtual shops: two thumbs up from us!

A law student and GNU/Linux buff from Ljubljana, Slovenia, Matija is also a fan of jamendo. A few weeks ago, when his external hard drive crashed, causing him to lose his entire music collection, he had an idea: “I thought, ‘heck, if I’m happier with free software, let’s see if I can live with free music as well!’” So he came up with The (Great) Jamendo Experiment: “to live with only free music for at least a full month and survive.”

This being a real human experience, he decided he’d report about it weekly on his website, sharing his musical findings and letting people know if listening to all-jamendo music all the time was a viable choice. 

Well guess what: more than 6 weeks later, he’s still at it and quite happy at that. “Quite fast I realised that jamendo is full of great artists! I decided to prolong the experiment until further notice and write reports as time permits.”

So far, Matija reports the discovery of about two dozen artists he really liked, including The Very Sexuals, Grace Valhalla, Jimmy The Hideous Penguin and Elektronoid.

Ok, this is something pretty basic yet new here: just a little weekly post to present you an artist on jamendo that we like and think you (or at least some of you) will like too.

Inaugurating this new column is Fhernando.

Hailing from Mexico City, Fhernando blends disco melodies and dance beats in a furiously danceable mix. His album Sweet Addiction is available in several versions, complete with B-sides & rarities, bonus tracks and remixes.

Hope this keeps you dancing through the weekend!

We couldn’t be happier for Professor Kliq. Not only is he a great artist (a talented young electronic music producer from Chicago), he’s also starting to make some money through jamendo.

His music is quite popular among professionals looking to license tracks for ads, videos, websites, etc. on Jamendo PRO, and he’s been accumulating quite a few licensing deals in the last few weeks. In fact, he’s currently one of the artists making the most money from Jamendo PRO.

We didn’t even ask him to say something nice about jamendo. Kind words just seem to pour out of him: “The site is fantastic… I keep up to date on my licensings and they come through pretty regularly. I bought myself some new clothes and shoes with my last payment!”

As we say, we couldn’t be happier for him… As for us, it’s having great music by artists such as Professor Kliq that’s making Jamendo PRO a success; so we’re pretty happy too!

Professor Kliq - Trip Home from Harald Walker on Vimeo.