Listening to New Music: Part 2

In my first Listening to New Music post, I talked about my tendency towards picking a few singles off an album and never really listening to the whole CD from start to finish. After writing that post, I got to thinking and decided to commit to picking an album every month that I would listen to in its entirety. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been listening to the album Furr by Blitzen Trapper. Some songs are really growing on me and others are a bit too loud for me and I find myself skipping them. I definitely find that I crave more of a variety (still addicted to those playlists) and I am not as patient as I used to be when it comes to listening to an album in its entirety. Although, I had an interesting observation the other day…if the album is an actual CD that we bought (as opposed to residing in my iTunes library on my computer) it tends to get some serious playtime in our CD player in the kitchen. Last spring I bought my husband 2 CDs as part of his father’s day present; She & Him: Volume 2 and Sarah McLachlan: Laws Of Illusion. We listened to them both LOTS and I love them!

Shortly after my first “Listening to New Music” post, my sister and I were chatting and she told me about a website called eMusic . eMusic is a digital music club that makes finding and buying music a total joy. All music purchased from their site is yours to own (not rented or streamed) and you decide which membership level you want to sign up for. The basic membership is $11.99/month which gives you $11.99 worth of music and all other membership levels give you bonus credit. For example, if you sign up for the eMusic Plus plan, you pay $15.99/month but get $16.99 worth of music credit. The higher the membership level, the more music credit you receive. You can buy singles or albums (typically for less than they cost on iTunes and Amazon). As a bonus, you get $20 of credit just for signing up! Those who know me, know that I cannot resist a deal…so I decided to join. BTW- if you are interested in checking eMusic out with a free $10.00 credit, let me know and I can forward you an invitation. There is no need to join if you don’t want to and you can keep all of the music that you downloaded.

So far, I’ve been very pleased with eMusic. I love the amount of information you can get for each album (critic’s review, user’s reviews, user’s star ratings, concert information if they happen to be on tour, as well as related artists and other album recommendations). It is super easy to create/save lists of albums that you might want to buy later. In the short time that I’ve been an eMusic member, I have already accumulated quite a list of music I might want to buy in the future as well as decided to buy an album from an artist that I had never heard of (An Australian band called The Beautiful Girls). The ratings and reviews for their US debut album, as well as listening to the short clips of the songs had me purchasing with great confidence. You can go to eMusic to check out the entire album Learn Yourself as well as enjoy listening/watching their track “Music” below. Quite apropos if you ask me!