Jamendo Gets A New Look, And Criticism

Jamendo is one of the coolest destination for free music on the Internet. There, I said it. We have covered the service multiple times in the past on Ghacks. The site operators recently changed the design of the website, to provide users with a "more user friendly, simply website", that allows everyone accessing it to "discover, listen to and download thousands of music tracks without limitation".

The announcement over at the official Jamendo blog details what's new on the music portal:

• The simple, new interface
• More accurate search results
• A faster, more responsive site
• An enhanced HTML5 music player
• Artists can now download single tracks without associating them to an album
• Ten new Jamendo radio channels

When you open the new Jamendo in your web browser of choice, you will notice that the design and layout has changed considerable. The frontpage displays five banner like entry points to the site, followed by a listing of the site's most popular tracks, artists, and the ten Jamendo radio channels.

When you hover your mouse over a track, artist or radio station, you see play and download buttons pop up that you can use right away. When you click on the play button, the music starts to play right away on the same page.

The music player is displayed at the bottom, along with the usual controls plus options to download and share the current track.

While part of the community has welcome the changes and the new design, a vocal part has criticized the site operators for it. Without doubt the biggest point of criticism is the step away from an album centric website towards a track centric one.

Jamendo's staff has posted a response to the criticism on the blog, addressing the core points of criticism. The developers note:

However, after assessing your feedback, we understand the desire of many artists who remain attached to the album approach and will improve our interface very quickly by enabling:

• album reviews in addition to the current track review option
• display of both album and track reviews on the album pages
• rearrangement of the artist page so new albums are more visible, higher up on the page
• the display of favorite albums in the MyMusic section in addition to the current playlist of favorite tracks
• displaying the number of listens for each album on the album page
• a better presentation of the most recently released albums/tracks.
• The search page furthermore will display both tracks, albums and artists.

It is great to see the site operators react so fast to user criticism, and while there  will surely be some users who still do not like the new design, the majority of users should be quite satisfied with the announcement.

Have you been on the new Jamendo website yet? If so, what is your impression of it?

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