"eMusic's customers are rabid, smart and adventurous consumers of music. For 10 years, we've been proud to help you explore the best music from independent labels throughout the world and present it with the curatorial excellence that you value. We've worked hard to create a corner music store experience where you can get knowledgeable recommendations on the latest releases as well as dig through the stacks to find hidden gems you didn't know about.
Today, we want to let our U.S. subscribers know that soon we'll be adding even more of the music you want from the catalogues of labels like Arista, Columbia, Epic and RCA - that means artists including the Strokes, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen and The Clash to name a few. True to eMusic's standards, we'll put this body of work in the right context with helpful insight and recommendations from our expert editorial staff with a pronounced emphasis on the places where the legends and our favorite indie artists intersect.
The addition of these bold-face names doesn't change our mission. eMusic will always be an alternative to mass market digital music stores -- a deeper, richer music shopping experience. Over the past year, we've added a host of new features to re-create the experience of the corner music store using the technological advantages of the web to supplement our tried and true human touch.
As you already know, musical context today doesn't exclusively come from an LP cover or liner notes, but rather from many sources throughout the web. eMusic album and artists pages give you the ability to form a deeper understanding of artists you're interested in by checking out reviews written by the eMusic community of members, writers and editors, as well as related content on sites like YouTube, Wikipedia and Flickr.
We also know that word-of-mouth doesn't only happen in your local record store anymore; it happens when people introduce their friends to their favorite artists by sharing their experiences throughout a range of social networking sites, so we've made it easy to do so by integrating those links on our site.
Finally, we've added a powerful new recommendation engine that functions like your friendly music store clerk, absorbing your preferences with every action you take and offering recommendations tailored to your personal tastes.
We're excited to bring all of these advantages together to help you discover and, in some cases, rediscover, this amazing music.
Independent labels and artists will continue to be eMusic's core. But now more than ever, the distinction between indie and mainstream music simply does not matter - people love all sorts of music and our goal is to present all of it in a way that creates a community not only of music buyers, but of music lovers.
We do have a question though for our customers. We've been requested to carry major label titles for years, but we always have gone back and forth on whether it would change the fabric of eMusic. We don't think it makes sense to exclude great artists simply because their label partner is one of four specific companies. We look to some of our favorite music -- The Sex Pistols, The Clash -- and we certainly never think to ourselves "Major Label." What do you think? Do "major" and "indie" mean anything to you or is this just industry jargon?"
Danny Stein
eMusic CEO and Chairman
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