Comparison of Jamendo, Bandcamp, Archive.org and Noisetrade
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by SamVimes
I tried to give you a small overview of the four biggest free-music-sites on the internet. I will try to add more over the next weeks, if you have any suggestions leave a comment.
| Service: | Archive.org | Bandcamp | Jamendo | Noisetrade |
| amount of available downloads: |
663,634 items (i guess every mp3 counts as one item so i estimate there are about 66 366 albums) |
many, but i can’t find an exact number. | 48997 albums | around 4000 (estimated from the amount of artists on the site) |
| popular genres | great variety of genres, much experimental and avant-garde music | they also have nearly everything, many rock , folk and pop downloads, even from popular artists like Amanda Palmer or Sufjan Stevens | many albums are tagged with ambient, experimental, electronic or soundtrack | mostly rock, folk/americana and pop, often with a christian background and with a focus on artists from the Nashville-area |
| Design/clarity | really terrible,design from the 90’s, it’s hard to find what you looking for, no ads | simple but nice and effective, you can sort albums by genre, country , popularity or publishing-date (not by price), the artist-pages are very customizable but not as overloaded as myspace, ad-free | you can sort albums by many aspects, there are ads to finance the service, | nice, there aren’t as many options to sort the albums as at bandcamp or jamendo, but there’s a working search and the artist-pages are clean and intuitive, only ads for other artists |
| Quality of the music | differs from album to album, there are many cover-versions of popular songs and home-recordings which aren’t worth listening, but also some great, well-produced recordings | mostly good and well-produced, all albums are available in every file-format you can imagine | differs, many badly recorded albums with poor quality but also some real gems, downloads in mp3 or ogg | mostly good and professionally recorded, downloads are mp3s |
| License of the releases, pricing-options | differs, but all songs are free of charge | many albums aren’t free, some are pay-what-you-want, and sometimes you get the download in exchange for your zip-code and e-mail-adress | all albums are cc-licensed and free to download, you can donate to the artists or buy products from their shops, there is a store for commercial use of the music | All albums are free to download in exchange for your e-mail-adress, optional you can post about the album on twitter or facebook from the page |