Madam Snowflake has released 19 albums — 11 of them under her given name, Emily Richards — and has published recordings of over 300 original songs and poems.
Emily Richards was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she studied piano, voice, dance, and accounting. She recorded her first album in Nashville, which was released in 1996 through a unique partnership with movie theater giant Cinemark Corporation. After signing a recording contract with Grammy-winning John Jones in 1998, Emily moved to Los Angeles.
At the turn of the millennium, Emily Richards became renowned as a digital music pioneer — one of the very first artists to share her music on the Internet. With over 2 million unique downloads, she became the most popular artist on MP3.com and headlined the revolutionary site’s 50-city tour, where 100 bands opened for her across the United States and Canada.
During that tour, a heartbreaking tragedy occurred: Emily’s younger sister, Annie, lost her life near their family home after being struck by a drunk driver racing a motorcyclist at over 100 miles per hour in the dark — without headlights.
Dedicating her art to her sister, Emily’s music became a powerful amplifier for change. Over the next decade, she headlined a series of tours and concerts focused on sustainability and responsible driving, in cooperation with Rock the Vote, Recording Artists Against Drunk Driving, the U.S. Stop DUI Caucus, Earth Fest, Earthdance, the National Biodiesel Board, and Solfest.
In 2008, Emily embraced the stage name Snowflake and founded ArtisTech Media, which operates the award-winning remix site ccMixter.org. On ccMixter, she has freely shared hundreds of her original songs and stems under open licenses.
By releasing her vocals, Madam Snowflake has risen as a star in the Dutch hardstyle scene over the past decade. She has accumulated more than a dozen festival hits and has performed live on some of the Netherlands’ largest stages to more than thirty thousand screaming fans — including appearances at Defqon in 2024 and Intents in 2025.
Prior to her performances in Holland, Madam Snowflake suffered a severe hip injury that left her on bedrest and in a wheelchair for over three years. During this difficult period, she began long meditation sessions, which helped facilitate the writing of the story, songs, and music for Rise Up Babylon, originally created as a stage musical for a 23-person cast. After the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted live performances, she rewrote Rise Up Babylon as a one-woman show and, ultimately, the musical audiobook released by Blackstone Publishing on July 28— on Audible, Amazon and everywhere audiobooks are shared.
Madam Snowflake is the founder of the nonprofit AWAKE Community (Artists Working for Awareness, Knowledge, and Education), which advocates living in harmony with nature and one another, and seeks to follow Indigenous wisdom teachings on living in right relation with the land.
She splits her time between Kauai and Los Angeles, where she and her husband steward two natural habitats — living experiments in organic gardening and sustainability.
For more information, visit madamsnowflake.com.
