Jamendo is a new model for artists to promote, publish, and be paid for their music: the artists distribute their music under Creative Commons licenses, allowing you to download, remix and share their music freely. It's a "Some rights reserved" agreement.
Jamendo almost passed the 4000 albums mark and offers some great features that make it easy to share and discover new music. You can browse their album collection by genre, country, popularity or tags, for example. If you find an album that you like, you can share it on your blog, write a review, or donate directly to the artist.
The albums on Jamendo are available in MP3 (~200Kbps) and Ogg Vorbis (300Kbps), and can be downloaded with your favorite BitTorrent client or Emule.
The variety of genres, the sheer amount of high quality music and the enthusiasm that is out there for making music with no (instant) financial reward is, simply, astonishing. They've recently introduced an amusing way of discovering new music on the site, called The Spiral. The Spiral allows you to star albums, and then to receive recommendations on the basis of what you've already liked.
