EMI Launches Its Own Music Website

EMI.com starting Wednesday.

The site is a work in progress, according to the label, which hopes to learn more about what makes digital music consumers tick by running a website of its own.

Visitors will be able to stream songs on-demand, create an unlimited number of playlists from songs and videos and discover music that's similar to their currently-playing track, for free.

The service extends to Great Britain, where users will be able to stream complete songs, and to the United States, where playback will be limited to 30 seconds per track. Surely, one of the improvements EMI wants to make to the site over the coming weeks and months is the addition of full-track playback in the US and elsewhere. (Oh, the irony of a record label not being able to play its own songs in the US due to licensing complications.)

"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."

A source close to the situation said that in addition to learning about digital music consumption patterns, the site will give EMI's music a permanent online home so that fans can find it there regardless of what's going on elsewhere on the internet. As an experiment for EMI and a permanent repository for artist images, videos and songs outside of the label's deals with distributors, EMI.com is likely to be a success. These modest goals make sense, because a site that offers music from just one label is unlikely to compete with sites that offer everything or purport to do so.

By Eliot Van Buskirk for Wired.com