Today, we added more than 2,500 popular music albums from EMI to the OverDrive catalog, with thousands of additional albums set to go live in the coming weeks.

The new collection, available to US library partners, features full WMA albums (one-copy, one-user) from pop superstars and legendary artists, including Keith Urban, R.E.M., David Bowie, Robbie Williams, Janet Jackson, and the Smashing Pumpkins. As the collection grows, you’ll be able to add albums from Katy Perry, Norah Jones, John Lennon, Coldplay, Gorillaz, Lady Antebellum, and hundreds of additional artists to your Virtual Branch website for your users to download and enjoy.

The EMI collection fulfills the long-standing request from our partners to add more popular music to our catalog.  Just like the blues, jazz, classical, and pop already available to your library, music albums from EMI will have embedded navigation markers, allowing users to move from track to track in OverDrive Media Console for Windows. With OverDrive Media Console’s Transfer Wizard, users can transfer the full album (less the media markers) to a host of compatible devices for listening on the go.

We do, however, know that supplier restrictions on album downloads are sometimes met with frustration.  With that in mind, we want to be open about the specific limitations on the EMI titles, which disable both “Transfer to iPod/Apple Devices” as well as “Burn to CD” on the entire EMI collection.

We still believe your users with Windows Media DRM-compatible devices will enjoy the massive collection of popular albums from EMI artists. Thousands of albums are downloaded from Virtual Branch websites every month, and adding this EMI collection will encourage more users to borrow music downloads from your library.

In addition to this new collection of popular music from EMI, we plan to launch a new music service in early 2011 that provides popular MP3 music by the track. This DRM-free download service will complement the music collection on your Virtual Branch, and will support virtually any MP3 player, including iPod and other Apple devices. (More on that soon.)

Are you interested in adding this great collection of EMI music to your digital catalog? Contact our collection team.

Dan Stasiewski is a marketing associate for OverDrive.