Yancey Strickler is Senior Director, Editorial & Features at eMusic, the world's largest retailer of independent music and the world’s second-largest digital music retailer. A subscription-based service that allows consumers to own, not rent their music, eMusic is the largest service to sell tracks in the MP3 format. Editorial on the site includes the Review of the Day, regular columns in every genre and the eMusic Dozen, which is a brief overview of a genre, era, place or artist, followed by reviews of the 12 best eMusic albums fitting the topic

What's your name & job title?
Yancey Strickler. Senior Director, Editorial & Features at eMusic.

When did you start working in digital music?
I've been working for eMusic since July of 2004, and I started then as eMusic's Managing Editor – my background is in editing/journalism/music criticism. But starting about a year or so in, I started drifting more towards merchandising or placement totally by accident, which is what I have been doing recently. Basically what this means is that I listen to records all day, consult with other folks here, pay close attention to what people are downloading and then come up with a map for what we're going to feature on the site, and how.

Why did you decide to get into digital music?
I was born to work with music in some way or other, and what other option is there these days? My father is a musician, and he always pushed me in this direction. I knew I could never be a rock star - I play guitar, but poorly – but I had to be somewhere in the mix. My first real foray into the music biz was getting to intern for the local college radio station (WUVT, Virginia Tech's radio) when I was in high school. Just stacks and stacks of records, and people way cooler than me talking about bands I didn't know and didn't like, but I just had to be a part of it. I'm a huge dork, and I'm always chasing knowledge, and these folks had it more than anyone else. From there came writing (Pitchfork was my first – albeit super-brief (I was terrible) – freelance gig) and, after twists and turns that took me through the bowels of ClearChannel and some good times with flavorpill, now eMusic.

And just because I kind of like the story, here's how I got to eMusic: I was at a little industry show by the Fall at the Caroline offices in Manhattan, and I ran into Michael Azerrad (author of Our Band Could Be Your Life, producer of the Cobain pic About a Son) at the snack table. I knew Michael a bit through our mutual friend Ira Robbins, and he mentioned that he might have a cool opportunity for me with this new company he was working for called eMusic. I figured it was just a writing gig or something, which I was psyched about.

Maybe a week later he calls and asks me to come in for an interview. We sit and talk and it goes well, but I still don't really know what position I'm interviewing for. And then I leave, feeling good about it, and right outside the building my cell rings, and it's Michael, asking if I would like to be the managing editor at eMusic. I was bowled over – to my mind being a managing editor was something cigar-chomping men did, and who the hell was I? But of course I said yes. It's still a cherished moment.

What do you do on a typical day?
The first thing I do every morning – even before I come into the office – is scan the Freshly Ripped section of the eMusic site. That's where the day's new additions are listed. Each day I do my best to listen through the vast majority of what comes in, although I do give things with better album covers a harder listen. I work with my compatriots here to figure out what's good and what's worth pushing, and then I begin filing those things into different areas of the site, as well as come up with broader plans for titles that warrant it.

There are other things of course – more rote and less exciting stuff – but this is what I describe my job as to people at parties.

How did you get your first break, and did you need any experience?
A big yes to experience. I don't really know what my first professional break was. Probably when I cold-pitched a music review on spec to Chuck Eddy, then the music editor at the Village Voice, on an album by a band called Calla and he decided to run it. Getting in the Voice gets you on other editors' radars, which leads to better work/better resume/better everything.

But I think that it was at flavorpill, a great weekly cultural email magazine focusing on events in various cities around the world, that I really learned what it was to take responsibility for a large amount of work and just get it done. I worked crazy hours there, but it just became compulsive; there was a deadline to hit, and we had to do it, no questions asked. And so at flavorpill I became a better editor, I became better at managing a staff, I became better at understanding what people like and why, I became better at establishing processes, a whole lot of stuff like that.

What was your best day on the job?
There have been a lot of good days, but I'd say the best was the first time this ten-minute show we made with IFC called The eMusic Dozens aired. I was running this thing on our end – totally in over my head – and working really closely with some great, great guys at IFC (Craig Parks, Dan Kennedy, Kent Rees) to envision and actually create this cool video piece that highlighted not only what eMusic was about, but why it is we all care about music so much. (Note: you can watch the thing here.)

Anyway, we had been cranking on this forever, going through so many iterations, working our asses off, and then, finally, the thing was done and I got to watch it live on TV. It was probably the 572,829,230th time I had seen it, but it was really, really special. I had never done anything like that before. I probably feel even more proud of the show now than I did at the time. It's a shame we didn't do more of them.

What was your worst?
I have this bad habit of volunteering for things. That's how I got into the merchandising stuff (no one was controlling what albums appeared on our homepage); that's how I got into the IFC thing (we had talked around the idea of something like that, but finally myself and another person here, Reid Genauer, pushed it through); that's how we started 17 Dots, the eMusic blog; that's how I'm neck-deep in a whole bunch of upcoming stuff.

And though I wouldn't trade this part of my job for anything, most of my worst days have come thanks to 17 Dots and our message boards. See, no one here was really talking directly to our subscribers, engaging them on music, acknowledging that they have built an incredibly self-sufficient and strong community with little to no help from us. And so I volunteered to be eMusic's voice in our community, which has been great. Just last week some of us from eMusic met up with some of our subscribers, and it was just awesome. Such great people, and really, really effing smart. They were exactly who we hoped they would be.

But anyway, there are days when things break on the site. Or days when there's bad press. The typical ups and downs of a company. And so on days like that I have to articulate eMusic's position to our customers, and even though most of them recognize I am but a messenger, it can get stressful, with folks understandably venting their frustration, and there's little I can do to help them aside from offer reassurances that we hear what they are saying – we honestly do – but I don't have much more power than that. So yeah, those days definitely blow, but I know how much worse it can be.

If you had any handy tips for young people who wanted to do your job, what would they be?
Well, on the surface level, my gig is a music one, so certainly knowing how to really articulate – not just in words, but visually – and recognize what you love about music is important. But just as big in my job is technology: feeling comfortable using a wide variety of tools, like traffic data, in-depth marketing reports, content management systems, etc. I am extremely comfortable with all of this stuff – I'm kind of wired for it – and it helps a lot. At a company like ours, it really helps to be able to talk on a semi-literate level with engineers, with marketing people, with a wide swath of specialties. By no means am I proficient in these areas, but I can fake it well enough. So the biggest tip is to be well-rounded. At this point in time there is no excuse for not having some working knowledge of all aspects of your company. It's incredibly beneficial, and will certainly be a big help if you are looking to get more responsibility.

What does music mean to you?
Everything. My whole life I have cared more about music than anything else. I am an obsessive listener. I'm the sort of guy who listens to the same song on repeat for an hour and doesn't get sick of it. I am always looking for stuff I don't know, and I enjoy challenging what it is that I think I like. And so much of it is about life itself – the way a song sounds in a car on a country road with the windows down on a summer night; the way music feels when your lover is singing it; that burst of excitement you feel when a song goes where you least expect it. Just so many little capsules that encompass what's so great about life in general.

And even for someone like me, someone who, honestly, is pretty hyper-critical about music, there's stuff to love even in the worst of it (which there is a lot of, as we all know).

How did the advent of digital in music change things for you?
I assume you mean when I got my first Minidisc player? I was convinced the world was going to change with that. Yeah, we know how that turned out.

There's not a lot of new stuff I can say on this topic, so I will close with a personal anecdote of How Digital Music Helped My Life: about five years ago I was living in a tiny apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and half of the living room was overtaken by my 3,000 or so CDs. Unemployed for the first time in my life (thanks ClearChannel!), I decided to rip every one of my CDs to an external hard drive, which took about three months. And then, out of nowhere, I got a ridiculous toothache, and uninsured me suddenly had to have a root canal that was going to set me back $1,500. I had no idea what to do, and so, in a panic, I sold every one of my CDs, raising enough money to pay for my tooth fixed. (I totally regret this decision now.) But so yeah, due to MP3s I have decent dental hygiene. Thanks technology!