News in today that Jamendo, the orange behemoth of the free music movement, isn't doing quite as well as the universe would hope.

'Jamendo, a community of free, legal music published with Creative Commons licenses, is actively looking to sell to or merge with another company, TechCrunch Europe has learned. Jamendo CEO Laurent Kratz has confirmed rumors that had made their way to Twitter earlier this week.' - TechCrunch Blog

Which is rather hard to read as good news. If Jamendo goes then obviously a big blank space is left within both the free music community and within our movement's attempts to gain more mainstream exposure; as a focal point
and as a service provider for fans and artists the Orange One is pretty much the best we've got given the slightly chaotic, unfocused nature of Archive.org and the relative anonymity of LegalTorrents. Their decline could certainly set things back significantly and scare off those who might previously have considered launching their own large scale CC related project. And perhaps worse is the alternative of Jamendo merging with another company, who it's hard to imagine would leave the site to plough it's own relatively simple and largely free furrow. Any merger would, I suspect, result in at the very least a more aggressively commercial model being adopted by the site which I can't imagine doing any good for the community assuming it even retains ties to the initial concept of Creative Commons licensing as opposed to evolving into some gimmicky MySpace-esque morass.

It's too soon to say what, if anything, will come of all this but for now at least it seems that it'll be nothing good. As ever TCUC will report back with any developments.