Tonado Insider reports about a new bottom-up approach in music downloading - Jamendo - not too far away from last.fm:

Today, investment bank Bryan, Garnier & Co issued a press release announcing an investment by Luxembourg-based VC (and early Skype investor) Mangrove Capital Partners in fellow countrymen Jamendo. The tombstone in the statement indicated that the deal - of an undisclosed sum - was closed in June. Mangrove is on a roll: in the past month and a half, a staggering six pan-European deals were recorded for the firm. It acted as sole investor in two of these, including the Jamendo deal.

Jamendo is an online music platform based on the use of so-called 'Creative Commons', a relatively new standard for content distribution. Creative Commons licenses allow copyright holders to grant some or all of their rights to the public while keeping others. The overall aim is to avoid copyright problems when sharing information. Content available under Creative Commons is rapidly increasing (over 45 million works according to the statement) and used by numerous Internet companies (e.g. Flick'r, Yotophoto.com, MusicBrainz, Splice Music, JamGlue, etc.)

Meanwhile, Jamendo is growing as well. It boasts a catalogue of 4,000 albums, more than one million downloads, nearly 150,000 active users and 50,000 critics. It is one of those music distribution services - like German company Sellaband and US-based Amie Street and Sonific - that seek new (legal) models to allow artists to promote their music and users to find and listen their music of choice. Artists can use Jamendo for free to distribute and promote music through peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent and eMule and earn money through advertising revenues generated by the site. Users can listen, download, replicate, mix and share music for free.