According to a recent article in TechCrunch (Digital music startup Jamendo runs out of steam, mulls sale) Jamendo is running out of funds from it’s initial investment from Mangrove Capital Partners, and therefore is seeking a new investor. This is bad news for the Libre Culture movement / CreativeCommons. But, there are several things about this turn of events that make me feel there is a chance for something better to come about.
The Site and The Code
To be brutally honest, there are quite a few things about Jamendo that I don’t personally care for.
First, I think the website user interface is poor. It has the look of the Playskool Windows XP user interface, only very very orange and purple. The visual flow of the home page is cluttered and difficult to follow. The three column layout doesn’t make a whole lot of sense: the organization of the content just doesn’t flow all that well.
Finding things on the site can be more complicated than one would think. I was talking with someone in IRC right after I read the TechCrunch story, and we started looking for a place to make a donation to Jamendo. It took two of us nearly half an hour to find the place to do it, and even then I don’t think I could find it again without searching. Why isn’t there a button or someplace easy right on the front page to make a donation?
Then there is the forums. The way the forums are organizationally a mess. I keep trying to go in there to read some things, just to see who likes what artists, and what topics there are regarding the site, etc. But I keep being confronted with a long list of topics, none of which look like things I want to read. And there is no real navigation or heirarchy to allow me to zoom in on the things that I want. And, even trying to search for the information I wanted was unsuccessful (mostly becuase I didn’t know the terminology used to describe what I was looking for…). When I posted a message about it (making a suggestion) I was immediately ponited to a thread that provided a work-around, but didn’t really address the issue itself. It’s possibly just me, I just feel that if there were more structure to the message boards, I could have found the information I needed.
After this story broke, I spent some time digging around the Jamendo website, getting a feeling for a few other things about the way it is put together and run. The thing that was a surprise to me is that the whole system appears to be closed source. There are open API’s for communicatnig with Jamendo, and there is a developers area for those that are working on applications. However, when it comes to the system itself, it seems that there is no review of the code. There isn’t any open source tracker system. Okay, there is a Google Code site, but there is all of three defect reports, and only API code in the repository.
Artist Problems
On the same weekend that Jamendo’s problems came out in the public, one of the most prolific and most listened to artists on the site write a blog entry: Jamendo Corrupto (originally in Spanish, translated into English). The blog entry lists a number of issuse that PeerGynt Lobogris had with Jamendo, to the point where he has left the site.
If even a portion of the allegations made in PeerGynt’s post are correct, there are some very deep problems with Jamendo as a company. This personally leads me to the think that the future of the current company is quite bleak, and should be seriously considered when think about any solutions.
One More Problem
There is something else that has to be considered about the downfall of Jamendo: there will be collateral damage:
- The many hundreds or even thousands of artists that will lose their place to host their music, and try to build a reputation and a following is a serious impact to the community.
- Music players like SongBird, Amarok, Rhythmbox and others have built in support for Jamendo. While it’s possible to remove this support, losing the site and the potential for bringing new listeners into the cause is major loss to the Free (Libre) Culture community as a whole.
- Libre.FM – the fledgeling Last.FM replacement relies heavily on using Jamendo’s database for identifying free music that people are listening to. Again, it’s possible to do something to replace Jamendo (and this has been discussed in the Libre.FM channel on freenode), it still represents another major loss to the community as a whole.
And those are just the ones that are coming to my mind immediately. There are probably others that I have not even considered at this point. However, just those three items are serious enough.
So Where Do We Go From Here?
It seems to me that it is probably time for there to be a major consideration about Jamendo. I personally don’t think that it is going to survive in it’s current form. While there is a movement to raise funds to keep Jamendo going, this may not be the best thing for the future of Free (Libre) Music and Culture, and that suggests it is time for something else to happen.
Recent history has shown us the path in cases that I would suggest are similar to Jamendo: StatusNet was born in reaction to the closed nature of Twitter, Libre.FM was born in reaction to Last.FM. Both of these projects make the case for movnig from Jamendo’s current structure into something newer, open source based, open development based, and a more distributed system.
Another case to consider (as pointed out by Fab on Linux Outlaws Episode 131) would be the idea of moving into a foundation type structure / organization. This would be much in keeping with the way Firefox and the Mozilla Foundation have organized themselves. And it makes sense, this would allow there to be a formal entity behind any future development, while making it more open to the community as a whole, and hopefully generating new interest in the project.
Another possibility would be to look at something similar to OpenOffice.org. Wether you like their product or not, one can’t argue with the fact that they are an open source environment, and have managed to weather many storms, changing of hands, etc. And are now in a position where it wouldn’t be easy for them to be taken out of the community. (Which couldn’t be said in the days when they were owned by Sun, and much of their source code was not available under free software compatible licenses.)
One suggestion that has been made a couple of times that is interesting: Google should buy out Jamendo. This is something that I don’t think is totally out of the question. Recently Google has bought several music services for integrating into their platform(s). Jamendo would make a good addition to this. However, some have suggested that they shouldn’t make changes to the service. I would disagree with that, given what I have discussed earlier about the platform not being open. If Google purchased Jamendo for the good of the community, and to better integrate their technology into their platforms, I would want to see the code opened up for everyone’s good.
Conclusion
So, Jamendo’s current problems seem to go well beyond the funding problem that they have stated they are having. The blog post from PeerGynt Lobogris makes Jamendo out to be “corrupt”. I personally doubt that they are truely corrupt, however, I think their problems have been making things difficult. I think they are understaffed, and there possibly could be a level of incompetence based on what I have seen… I say this because I see that Jamendo has the facilities to add advertsiting, yet no one appears to be selling ads on the site. They have the Jamendo Pro service, and that might be useful for generating revenue, but certainly that is a more difficult route to go than selling advertising.
The platform itself is another issue. It seems quite strange to me to be supporting the Free (Libre) Culture movement with an essentially closed platform. Don’t take that the wrong way, I think that Jamendo has done great things to support the Creative Commons and Free (Libre) Culture. However, I would think that they would be better served to open the platform, involve more developers, and build an Open Community around their system.
A combined issue: I noted how difficult it was to find the location to make a donation to Jamendo. This points to a weakness in the platform itself: it should be easy to make the dontation spot more visible. And, it shows a level of incompetence that the fundraising hasn’t been approached more broadly.
As I mentioned above, I think we’ve seen the relative success of alternative platforms such as StatusNet and Libre.FM. If this approach was combined with the idea of a Mozilla Foundation style organization might be the best thing for replacing the current Jamendo structure.
I’m not altogether sold on the idea of Google buying out Jamendo. I think they have their own irons-in-the-fire so to speak, and while it could be a good idea, I would like to see a situation where the people working on the project are more distributed. The idea of distributing the people working on a project amongst multiple companies it becomes more difficult to tear apart the project.
So, those are my thoughts, as such. There really is no end to the complications of this sitaution, or the possibilities for what can happen. All we can hope is that whatever does happen happens for the best.
Related posts:
“It seems quite strange to me to be supporting the Free (Libre) Culture movement with an essentially closed platform.”
Jamendo (unlike Mozilla, Openoffice, …) is about music – not about software. Even RMS doesn’t take the position that any software around should be released (or opened up) to the public. Rather, the position is, if a software is publicly released, then it must be free software.
In the past I worked for a company A that wrote a special software for another company B by contract. There was never an intention to release that software to the public. The only interest had been for the competitors of B to know what B’s internal workflows are like.
It’s just similar to Jamendo. They developed a sort of community software but tailored around their music service (so as to serve their special needs). It wouldn’t be clever to release such a software to the public (they don’t sell it as proprietary software either!), so that any competitor could use it to run a 2nd Jamendo.
The example with last.fm seems to indicate that you don’t see the essential differences. It’s not about closed / open platforms. Its about the music: by far the most music on last.fm is not under CC. In fact, last.fm is just another one of those music sites intended to be a distribution platform of the major music labels – the good old radio merely transfered into the internet.
On the other hand, you correctly noted some of Jamendo’s problems: they missed to build up a strong community including good relations to the musicians and there is a lack of professionalism in the business. They could do a lot better to sell ads and also if one compares their competence in their core business (which is selling commercial licenses) with beatpic.com for instance – well it’s pretty obvious, then.
However, (unlike beatpic) this platform has a tremendous value for society. There is some cultural change going on: all musicians have an openly accessible (not curated like the freemusicarchive, but free speech like) platform to find an audience, the audience has a platform to find new music (not the kind of stuff running in radio or MTV which is controlled by the established music industry) that also is free to use in different creative projects like videos. Some youngsters nowadays even create their own internet radios, which would be impossible if they had to pay fees to collecting societies for the music they play.
This is just what Lawrence Lessig had in mind when writing the CC licenses!
Hi Jörg,
First: thank you for a well written, very intelligent comment.
You are correct in stating that Jamendo is about the music, and I do applaud them for everything they have done in service to the music. I especially appreciate what they have done in terms of the Commons. I do understand the difference between the service offered by Jamendo vs. last.fm.
However, taking a hard, critical look at what the Jamendo platform provides currently, versus what it could be providing leads me to ask the question: what can be done to improve the situation? The best thing I can see would be to open up the code. This would allow innovation to proceed much more quickly, and could help in avoiding the current situation.
You seem to think the idea of having multiple instances of a service like Jamendo would be a bad idea. I would have to disagree. Look at StatusNet. There are at least two implementations of StatusNet. Federation between the two implementations allows users to sign up for either (or both) sites, and allows interchanging messages between the two. I honestly think that doing something similar to this would actually be a benefit to a Jamendo like system: the music could be hosted in multiple locations, allowing the server maintenance and bandwidth costs to be split between multiple sites. The database of artists / music / message boards could be merged into a common shared database. This way suers at each site could access the catalog and information of all the sites.
You are correct that no one (RMS or Lawrence Lessig) requires the platform to be open. However, it seems to me that the ideas of Free (Libre) Software and Free (Libre) Music (and Culture) are analogous, and should leverage each other whenever possible. This is one of the cases where I think there are many strengths that haven’t been explored.
I think we are in agreement on most of the other items (like community, musician relations, selling advertising, etc.)
I stated up front that I feel the situation with Jamendo is extremely complex. I delayed finishing my article for several days as I needed to spend a lot of time working out my thoughts, and trying to write them up in a good, well structured manner. From your comments, I think I was mostly successful, and still see some thoughts that maybe need some clarification.
Thank you again for your comment. It is wonderful to have an opportunity to engage in conversation with you regarding this issue.
George
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