WorldofBlues.com

I just signed up for eMusic and I have to say I’m impressed. Impressed enough to pass the information on to all of you worldofblues.com visitors. Let me be up front too and tell you I do get affiliate marketing payments if you click on the links from this site and sign up for a free trial at emusic. So by all means please do that! You can opt out of any subscription during the 7 day free trial period and still get 25 blues mp3s free. So with that pitch out of the way let me explain my emusic experience.

eMusic is a subscription service with various subscription packages. The basic and most inexpensive is eMusic Basic which entitles you to 30 Song Downloads per month and costs $11.99 per month. At about $0.40 per MP3 eMusic is less than half the price of the other services I buy MP3s from. You can cancel your subscription too which was important to me since I didn’t know how many songs I’d actually want to buy. When you cancel you just don’t get charged the next month, unless you cancel within the first 7 days of signing up in which case you pay nothing.

When you sign up for eMusic they require a credit card, debit card or paypal for registration. As soon as I registered I start browsing, being totally skeptical I’d find any blues at all. When I began browsing I was pleasantly surprised to find there actually is a link for the blues genre. It even got better when they broke the sections down in categories as I’ve shown in the screen grab to the right.

Right below that there are other ways to further refined your browsing. Now I didn’t think for second the Editor’s picks would give me Blues but you know I was wrong – sort of. The editors picks provided a pretty good list but among them I saw Ray Charles (ok he could play blues for sure but it wasn’t a blues album they were recommending). That’s when I realized the Blues genre also included Soul, R&B and Inspirational Blues. Fair enough on the Soul and R&B but Inspirational blues? I’ve been inspired by blues for sure but I didn’t believe for a second that they actually had a category of inspirational blues. The inspirational music in fact is not a sub-genre of blues. Though I did discover “The Erotic Cello for Relaxation” MP3s which I’m still tempted to spend some of my free choices on. This is about when I realized how good the browsing experience was really. If you select blues/inspirational/Editor’s Picks in that order you actually get some gospel music. by blues musicians. As traditional blues fans know a lot of the early blues musicians played gospel music under different names so there were even some pleasant surprises in that category.

So now for the tough question – are there blues to be had on eMusic. Oh yeah there certainly are. In the editor’s picks, on the very first page I found a few from my own essential blues recommendations these:

• In Session by Albert King With Stevie Ray Vaughan
• The Best Of John Lee Hooker: Vol.1
• Ice Pickin’ by Albert Collins

There were also some other recordings I’d been looking for including:

• First Recordings by R.L. Burnside
• Sun Recordings by Howlin’ Wolf
• The Best Of Lightnin’ Hopkins

There were even CD I haven’t heard and want to check out including:

• Rubber Factory by The Black Keys
• Live From Nowhere in Particular by Joe Bonamassa
• Showdown! by Albert Collins, Robert Cray & Johnny Copeland

Here is a little peak inside the Traditional Blues section of the eMusic store.

You can see there are 1361 traditional blues albums listed in this section and they are sorted by most downloaded. They can also be sorted by recent additions, artist name or record label. Record stores should strive to provide so many views of their inventory.

I have to say as well I was impressed by the preview of any given MP3 which seemed pretty long and provided very good sound quality.

So the bottom line is: I’d encourage worldofblues.com users to register for eMusic. Pick up a selection of fine blues including tracks from the above recommendations and with your 25 free MP3s. You can cancel your membership if you’re not impressed but I know its going to take me a few months to get all the blues I want from eMusic.