Albums added in July: 13,106

eMusic has (finally?) garnered a Web 2.0 makeover, adding in the obligatory design elements: large type treatments, pastels, glassy controls, AJAX motion, and of course gradients. Each album is also now festooned with related content from YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, and 17 other ’social networking’ sites. Fortunately many of these are collapsable so you can avoid them if you’re not doing more than just grabbing an album.

What I find most exciting, in suitably pedantic fashion, is the inclusion of much higher resolution album artwork. eMusic still features a lot of releases that are difficult to source elsewhere, which also includes finding quality cover art. Their prior thumbnails were even smaller than the iTunes default badge, let alone suitable for environments like CoverFlow or the iPod Touch. If you’re appreciably obsessive, you may want to go back into your download library and upgrade some of your album art, although it should be noted that some albums still have only the smaller original image and patchwork default images reminscent of Sierpinski triangles.

Featured Selections

Einstürzende Neubauten, The Jewels (15)

Collection of tracks originally offered to band supporters via the band’s site at neubauten.org. A step back from the more-conventional songcraft of previous works (e.g. Alles Wider Offen) to earlier experimental flair. Doubtless this is due to the origin of the tracks, which were constructed based on idea cards similar to Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” and taking lyrical cues from dreams.

Head Like A Kite, There Is Loud Laughter Everywhere (13)

I originally discovered Head Like A Kite via Pandora suggestion based on a playlist derived from the Cranes, though they sound very little alike. Loud Laughter, HLAK’s second album, takes more chances, covers a wider range of influences, and includes the irrepressive “No Ordinary Caveman.”


Nine Inch Nails, The Slip (10)

Trent Reznor’s online promotion experimentwas to distribute the album digitally for free as a reward to fans (still available on the band’s site). Along with Ghosts I-IV, the album restored my faith that Reznor &co. could still put out quality material that wasn’t generated by the same algorithm and sound blender combination that composed much of The Fragile on. Since you can download the album for free elsewhere, the main motivation to purchase here is to support NIN as you might buying the physical copy.

Ratatat, LP3 (13)

Jubilant rock carnival instrumentals make for infectious playground listening.

The Secret Meeting, Ultrashiver (10)

Collaboration between Curve’s noisemaker Dean Garcia and Collide’s vocalist kaRIN. With Collide already being among the most Curve-esque of the darkwave contingent, the crunch-clash result is the kind of beautiful noise you would expect.


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Albums added in June: 13,347

RIP George Carlin

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Albums added in May: 13,572

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Albums added in April: 10,769

I hope you got your Rolling Stones fix last month, since they’ve now been stripped out of the catalog for “events outside of our control” according to eMusic. This reversal is part of a larger issue affecting eMusic’s catalogue, which invisibly loses some portion of its releases even as it publicly reveals all of new additions. Just among the artists I note below, at least one is a repost of an album by Future Sound of London that had previously been offered and then removed at some point, plus all of Ladytron’s albums apart from the new “Ghosts” single have likewise vanished. The unfortunate lesson is that you can’t assume that your “Save for Later” selections will actually still be there when you have the downloads to spare.

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The March selections are a bit delayed as I decided to switch from a mid-month to end-of-month posting schedule, which meant going over 6 weeks of additions in total since February’s picks. March alone had 12,312 new albums posted. So, took a little while.

One helpful addition is the album page’s conversion of sound samples for all tracks from m3u files – which required playback in a separate program like iTunes, cluttering the library – to an inline player that lets you listen to the 30-second samples individually or together in sequence. This is diverting enough that I’m almost tempted to script a background player that chains together groups of albums for ambience, like an audio screensaver.

Last month was also the introduction of eMusic’s Test Your Music IQ. Despite missing a few I should have known and guessing a few I shouldn’t, I was satisfied with an honest score of 120/180 along with its rather hyperbolic assessment: (more…)

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Albums added since last update: 11,128 (and already I’m a few weeks behind again)

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Albums added since last update: 7,368

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