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I'm overly excited to finally announce this amazing global partnership deal back home with EMI Music. I know I have mentioned doing music in the past but for legal reasons I was not in a position to release any new music.

I wanted out of my record deal with EMI. They wanted me to record one type of album; I wanted to record the type of music I wanted to make.

To me, I'm for a band whose forefront is the music.

It strikes me as hubris that Universal will buy EMI. What it will do is create a super-major that will have far too much power... I think when Universal goes up over 40 percent market share, I don't see how reasonable regulators can countenance. It will impact not just labels, but artists and cultural diversity.

I'd been sending out demos and CDs for years. I knew my stuff was good enough, but I was getting nowhere. Then, three people - my future manager and two publishers - happened to send one of my tracks to EMI publishing in the same week. All of a sudden, they were interested!

The music industry is transforming fairly rapidly.

Just about the entirety of the first album, 'Brown Sugar,' I wrote it, the majority of that record in my bedroom in Richmond. And all of the demos for it were done on a four-track in my bedroom. I think EMI was a little leery of me being in the studio producing it on my own, which is what I was fighting for.

The music business has changed incredibly. There used to be 50 record companies. Now there's only three, and it's just getting smaller and smaller. But then again, you have the Internet, so anybody who has music can get it out there.

It doesn't seem expected for us to do something like that, but I love electronic music. I spend a lot of my time listening to that and just trying to understand what makes it work - what makes it move people the way it does and why they have some of the best-selling festivals in the world.

The Internet was a saving grace for promoting and exposing, and even creating. It's a parallel world to the music industry that already exists, and I'm glad to be a part of it.