Libre.fm: A music sharing site just for free-culture works

You've probably heard of "Last FM", a music playlist site that allows users to track their favorite bands and listen to music streamed over their mobile devices. But you may not have heard of Libre FM, a recent free software project and free culture web application intended to serve this purpose exclusively for free-licensed musical works.

I discovered this site when I was looking for what happened to some of the bands that had left Jamendo, and it does serve some of the same purposes. I do have certain doubts about it as a reliable source as yet -- it's still very much in an "alpha" state, and the software is therefore fairly incomplete. It's missing many of the features I've come to rely on with Jamendo (still the best site I know for this kind of search).

But it is a rich territory for the By and By-SA licensed works I'm usually looking for.

Another question I'm still not quite sure about is whether the site's albums have all been uploaded by their actual authors. Of course, there's no reason why this should be a requirement for free-licensed works, but that's only as good as the knowledge that the works actually were freed under such a license. If they are merely copied from other sites, then there is a small possibility of a "spoofed" (plagiarized) album getting onto the site. So far, though, they seem to have done a good job of screening their content, and I think Libre.fm shows a lot of promise as a new source for free-licensed music. It's also a nice free-software platform for streaming music.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.