Today I was out surfing the tubes, realized it’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog. I had written last with renewed enthusiasm for getting back into the regular habit of writing, and human laziness / a busy schedule kept me from sticking to that. I’ve also had a lot of personal developments in my life recently. For example, Mom got married! Exactly one year and a week after Dad passed, I threw a bachelor party for my new “bonus dad” Chris and then Saturday, June 13th, Chris and my mom got married.
So I found out, a great deal of popular artists I like are part of the EMI group. There are these big representative groups, most a little friendlier than the RIAA, that most radio stations pay royalties to once or twice a year so that they can play just about any artist’s songs without worrying about being sued. These groups usually take a cut and then make sure the artists interests are protected and they get royalties. Also, they get promoted. So, if you wanted a pretty nifty resource to learn stuff about artists or find more artists you’ve never heard about – EMI has a new web site that showcases their artists. It currently has auto-playing samples of their music – some of which is uncensored, so you might want to keep the volume down if you’re at work or have kids.
The home page has a neat CoverFlow-esque album cover viewer, and I was very pleased to see artists like Jet represented there.
The “Discover” Tab of the website is supposed to let you search for artists and find similar EMI music to what you searched for and build your “perfect playlist.” This actually worked pretty well as long as I stuck to fairly popular bands. I didn’t get any results from “Flobots” but “Hollywood Undead” found me EMI artist From First to Last. The only complaint I have is that I had to go to another website it linked to in order to hear the artists’ music if they didn’t have a sample on the EMI site. Jet seemed to be there and addable to the playlist, but for the new band I had to go to 7Digital through a new tab. 7digital is the online music store EMI’s site seems to be connected to where you can hear and buy the recommended artists’ music.
One thing I didn’t know that was neat is that several big-name Christian artists are EMI members, and some of their samples play on the EMI web site as well. I’m not as heavy into the Christian music as I used to be in college, but it’s still neat to see they aren’t just stuck in little independent groups not being treated like real artists.
EMI’s web site is also a great place to see a conglomeration of EMI artists news, fairly easily accessible from the site’s home page at the bottom. While the overall design is very snazzy, it also left you wanting more. I guess that’s sort of the intention – I just wish everything wasn’t a partial clip of the audio of songs. I’m not going to spend time building a playlist of 30-45 second samples. But it does make me want to go out and buy some more music – my collection is getting a little stale.
Check out EMI for yourself and let us know what you think in the comments.