EMI Launches Free Music Steaming Site

Okay, so… in coincidental follow up something I posted just yesterday it’s nice to hear EMI has launched their very own music website to stream music from their artists… for free.

Create your own playlists save them and stream them when you like. Type in keywords and get back a suggested playlist (like Last.fm), find artist bios and videos. Obviously all artists are signed to the EMI label… but it’s a useful tool to search the EMI catalogue and discover some of their artists.

The site the brandishes the BETA tag…

“EMI.com is designed to be a learning lab,” stated Alex Haar, vice president of digital special projects for EMI Music. “It will help us gain even more knowledge about consumers’ preferences and choices. Those insights will be invaluable to our artists, helping them respond to fans in a more relevant way.”

“This is the beginning of a longer term experiment,” he added. “In the coming months, we will continue to add content and features to the site.”

Hopefully that means it’s only going to get better with time and your feedback …and hopefully they’ll produce some smartphone apps (such as Last.fm and Pandora have for the iPhone). And (maybe you can already but I’m not sure) share/suggest tracks and playlists with friends.

Here’s a full write up and screen shots over at Wired. But I’d say just got and have a play with it yourself, it’s a pretty userfriendly interface, go to emi.com (unfortunatly only works in UK, and in the US you can only sample the tracks)

Note: A couple of tracks I tried to play couldn’t be found… but it only just launched today after all.