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Music is big bucks. How else can music celebrities afford Pradas, Jimmy Choos and million dollar bungalows. But open source is now creeping into this music industry and now there's some new players widening the field. Good stuff if you are looking for a lowcost way to headway into this cut throat industry.

First, there's this ccMixter, a site that provides tools that allow musicians to remix free music. There's also freesound, which provides raw materials for the creation of open music. And of course we have Magnatune, which applies Creative Commons licensing to the traditional record label model. The growing star in this space, though, is Jamendo. The folks behind Jamendo have put together a lot of the key pieces: Creative Commons licensing, no Digital Rights Management (DRM), MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats, an easy way for new musicians to upload their work, streaming audio for low-fi and peer-to-peer delivery for hi-fi, a web site in multiple languages, and a strong global community of listeners who can easily express their opinions. It's the the era of free music in a social networking medium.