I registered LesAutres.org March 21st last year. I think this was close to the beginning of the jamendo project (I had had the idea a few days before). What a strange path we’ve followed over one year.

A little jamendo history… LesAutres.org was the name of the non-profit I created with a few nice friends to promote free music. All the primary ideas were already there: P2P, CC, complete albums, etc… We had written a “manifesto” and I knew the project had the potential of becoming something huge (I still do :p).

A few months passed, I wrote about 40% of the current website. But I quickly realized the project wasn’t growing fast enough. We attended the first Both concert, had about 7/8 albums on the website, but that wasn’t good enough. So I decided to split the non-profit and the website. During July/August I went to Luxembourg as usual to work at Neofacto, and started convincing Laurent and Pierre to fund the project.

It all went great, and after many name changes (LesAutres.org => Altitune.org => PeerMajor.org => PeerMajor (.com) ), we ended up on “jamendo”, thanks to a bunch of marketing brainstormings with the damn cool Matthew Duder. We founded the company, PeerMajor. Registered the jamendo trademark.

I also rewrote the iRATE server code and protocol during the holidays, because the ratings were obvisouly going to be very important in jamendo.

Since this March 21st I can’t remember a single day I didn’t work on jamendo :) The last 5 months have been particularly exhausting because I also had tons of work to do at school. Of course school has always been only my second priority until now. But after all this great work I have to focus for a couple of months on my exams, which are very important if I want to enter a CS & Applied Maths school in Grenoble.

So I won’t work on jamendo anymore until mid-May, maybe I’ll do little patches when needed because there are really pieces of the code which I’m the only one to understand (and that’s not good but when I’ll have time, I’ll clean up… it’s only 3 to 5% of the code..). If I had kept the non-profit I’m pretty sure the project would be dead during this 2 monthes but now I trust Laurent, Pierre and David to do great work!