I’ve been getting my monthly fix of blues MP3s from eMusic tonight. My subscription entitles me to 30 MP3’s per month. I’ve blogged about emusic before and the fact they have lots of great tunes and you get 25 free MP3s of your choice just for signing up (you can cancel before you pay anything). To give blues lovers a taste of the type of music you can get from emusic here is a list of the MP3s I picked up tonight to round out this months collection:
Albert King Born Under a Bad Sign
Albert King Kansas City
Big Bill Broonzy Glory Of Love
Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry Trouble In Mind
Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry Everyday I Have the Blues
Canned Heat Bullfrog Blues
Dave Van Ronk You've Been A Good Old Wagon
Elmore James Madison Blues
Howlin Wolf Highway 49
Howlin Wolf Wang Dang Doodle
Howlin Wolf Built For Comfort
John Lee Hooker Boogie Chillun
Larry McCray All Along the Watchtower
Mississippi Fred McDowell You Got to Move
Rev Gary Davis Cocaine Blues
Robert Johnson Come On In My Kitchen
Taj Mahal Corrina
The Wet Willie Band She Caught The Katy
So if you want to check out emusic click on the banner below and start a free trial. You can get 25 free tunes and cancel before you ever start paying for a subscription.
If you’re curious about what else may be up on emusic.com that you may like leave a comment with the name of the artist you’re interested in and I’ll check it out and let you know if they have anything from them that you can download.
The X-FM B.B. King’s Bluesville Picks to Click seems to come out pretty sporadically. If anyone knows how to get it regularly I’d sure like to know. Anyway here is the list for the week of June 27, 2009 followed by an Amazon.com MP3 Widget so you can get a wee taste of each artist listed. Enjoy!
1. Bill “Howl-N-Madd” Perry, The Way Of The Blues – It’s A BHMP Thang
2. Louisiana Red, Back To The Black Bayou – Ruf Records
3. Cyril Neville, Brand New Blues – Brand New Blues
4. Nick Moss and The Flip Tops, Combo Platter # 2 – Blue Bella Records
5. Roy Rogers, Split Decision – Blind Pig
6. Shirley Johnson, Blues Attack – Delmark Records
7. Nicole Hart, Treasure – Blues Leaf Records
8. J.C. Smith Band, Defining Cool – Cozmik Records
9. Various Artists, Chicago Blues-A Living History – Raisin Music
10. Omar Kent Dykes, Big Town Playboy – Ruf Records
11. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, A Stranger Here – Anti Records
12. Alex Dixon, Rising From The Bushes – Dixon Landing Music
13. Danny Kalb, I’m Gonna Live The Life I Sang About – Sojourn Records
14. Charlie Musselwhite, Rough Dried – Henrietta Records
15. Steve James, Short Blue Stories – Hobemian Records
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.
Lately I’ve been enjoying the Something Blue podcast from Harry Larry. There is lots of great blues on the Something Blue website including this cool little widget which allows me to bring you the Something Blue Podcast.
Thanks Hairy Larry for your friendship and for supporting the blues.
Man you gotta love the internet. I’ve just found another Blues podcast. Its called The Salty Dog Podcast and the host “Salty” from down under is doing a fine job of bringing us the blues from down under.
Check it out here
While I’m at it the other blues podcast I’m a big fan of is The Roadhouse - The Best Blues You’ve Never heard.
If you know of a blues podcast you’d like to pass on to WorldofBlues.com viewers please leave a comment.
When you sign up for 
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. 
