wandering about free music: what it does

Ideal

To create a media that allows culture to freely flow from any creator to an interested receptor, bringing, beyond music, information, discussions, opinions and a feeling of belonging to a community

To the listener

Create a media that will constantly deliver music suited to his tastes, even if it changes everyday. And to allow him to exchange ideas and information with similar minded people, even the artists themselves.

To the artists

To take his art to the ones who will enjoy it, to make him know his public, who they are, and what they have to say about his music.

How it works

Radio Jaba is a software that, initially, simply plays the music you already have in your computer, minimal user interaction required, so you can focus in whatever is that you are doing. Gradually it observes patterns on your listening habits and starts to bring from the Internet musics that it thinks you'll probably like, and plays seamlessly. Along with the music, brings you encyclopedic articles about that band, histories about a given music movement and all sort of information on what you're listening, so you may have your well based opinion about it. As you give the program feedback on what you truly like, it gets sharper on finding music for you.

Jaba also offers you finely-picked play lists made by people who like similar musics, that you can use as guided tours to explore this musical universe. And finally offers you forums, where you can discuss any on-going issue concerning what you've been listening.

We hope that slowly, that passive user attitude may fade, and you become an active talker, starting discussions, writing articles, guiding new users into your musical collection. And, since you know so much about music, why not start recording your own?

Features

1
Not genres, but more kind of..

Trying to categorize something subjective as musics in objectives genres is not only impossible (where rock begins?; Where blues ends?; how you classify bjork?) but also leads to prejudice (ohh I hate Tecnho). But sometimes, you just need to classify someway. Some days, you just don´t want to hear any sex pistols/ ramones/off-spring kind of music.

Our approach is to classify music by relating to other artists. Whenever you skip a song that Radio Jaba has chosen to play, it interprets as if you are just not in the mood for that song today. So it excludes some artists to create a temporary profile of your musical choices, that will lead your style, just for now. You´ll be able to find unexpected connections in your own music library, while the program will be seeking on the net for new music that will surprise you.

Kind of is almost picking ingredients and then wait to see what you get: a small dose of Lou Reed, a spoonful of Dylan, a bit of George Harrison and let´s see what turns out.

2
Opinions comes with information. Culture comes with Discussion

If you hear CD-r full of unknown songs by obscure bands they will stay to you as a bunch of unknown songs. What is this? is this new York? is this Bombaim? Where this comes from. Before you can make an opinion, you have to know the facts, after you know the music you want to share your views about it. Also, music is part of our society, you want to feel that you are not the only one listening to this artist. To hear a given kind of song, you are ultimately joining a tribe.

With every piece of music, Radio Jaba will bring you some information from the world largest encyclopedia about that song, that album, that artist or something related. If no information exists, we´ll invite you to join the community of the Wikipedia project and start your own article about it!

But clod facts aren´t enough. In the same manner Radio Jaba seeks through the web to find music you might like, he explores his ever-growing database of blog, official (or not) fan sites and music news journals to find the lasts fuss on what you´ve been listening.

When you don´t know where to go, let someone else guide you.

Sometimes, you will find yourself in a unknown region not knowing what´s cool and what´s not. Whenever that happens, let some local guide give you a free tour. In Radio Jaba, every play list you make to yourself can be transformed in a public tour. List your favorite artists, make a themed group and podcast something about it. If all your musics are available freely on the net Radio Jaba will download them for whoever wants to take the tour.

Understand and share the legals

There are thousands of applications that download music, and in all their FAQ´s there is the "Is this legal?" question. Unfortunately a lot of them (those with spy ware) fool the user by stating "of course we are, we just make downloads" but omit that most of downloads available are a copyright infringement.

We, from Radio Jaba, believe that the best tool of change is to educate the user, as to make him aware that you cannot copy when it has copyright be copied but there are alternatives to pure copyright. At the side of each song, there is a copyright tag indicating what license is that song under. We want users to naturally understand what is a creative commons license, what music is under public domain, and many others cutting edge rights-management. And finally, we will help users to stay in the safe side of P2P networking: it will only download music freely available on the web and will only use peer to peer on songs with creative commons (or other free) tags. So artists will be rewarded by releasing in copyleft as their site won´t be overloaded if they get popular.

But what if someone pumps illegal music in your system?

Every tag in each file is constantly checked in a central free database (MusicBrainz.org) so as to be sure that this file Nicelooking.mp3 is not in truth a metallica song for example. That will also clean all those untagged or wrongly tagged files we find everywhere in the web. Besides, if someone really wants to download illegal music, he won´t be using Radio Jaba: there are thousands of applications that will do it faster.