Archive for June, 2009

EMI.  Yeah, those people.  The ones that look after the likes of  Coldplay, Katy Perry and Lily Allen.  Yeah, that EMI.  Why would you look at their website?  Erm… I wouldn’t.  Even when I googled some of their bigger name artists, the EMI website (or pages from) didn’t appear on the front page.  These days, once they’ve been on an artist’s website,  all anyone is interested in is twitter and myspace and youtube.  Why on earth would you head to somewhere like EMI?

Because if you do, you might just find some hidden gems.  Like the ‘discover‘ section, where you can find new music and create your perfect playlist.  It’s an interesting tool, if not a particularly specific one.  A search for something like Beyonce led me to suggestions of Christina Aguilera, Missy Elliot and Outkast; Lily Allen turned up Nelly Furtado and Madness. 

EMI also has a comprehensive list of the artists under their care.  Interestingly, following this link initially gives you the pictures and names of their breakthrough artists, instead of established and more popular artists, although some of the names seem to me to be way too established to be considered as breakthrough anymore.  If you click through to browse artists, the page isn’t quite so colourful anymore and you end up scrolling through text to find your chosen artist.  Either way, the result on clicking further is the same: album art and track listings from each of the artist’s albums and singles.  The tabs to switch to videos, photos and an artist bio are small, and I’ll admit that at first I did miss them.  What I do like about this section, is that I can play the videos at work, unlike youtube which is always going to be blocked.  There’s not just official music videos either, but also videos of live performances on tour.

The EMI website also contains charts for the most played video and audio but I’m not entirely sure these are that useful.  On my visit to the site the most played video was the one they’d selected to be top of an automated playlist when I first entered. 

The final main tab on the EMI website is ‘My Stuff’.  Of course this is completely useless unless you sign up.  So I did.  Just in case I was missing out on something.  Sign up is simple and requires answering a bare minimum of questions.  No email verification is required, which may or may not be a good thing depending on your point of view.  What you get with signing up is the ability to save multiple playlists on the site’s music player and to share your playlist on your blog and other social networking sites.  It sounds like a great idea but after scouring the site and selecting the best music for my playlist, I was told every single one of the tracks could not be found, including recent music such as Not Fair by Lily Allen and Hot & Cold by Katy Perry.

When compared against it’s contemporaries, the EMI site lacks the polish and engaging interactivity but the bare bones are there.  Perhaps if more work were done to iron out bugs in the site and provide more content, then the EMI site will go much further in the future.