One issue around getting started is that there are really two ways to interact with emms.
1. Behave like most other music-players (rhythmbox, clementine, banshee...): start with a lengthy scan of a music directory tree to populate a database (rhythmbox and friends) or cache (emms). Then build and play playlists from the browser.
2. Dive straight in: emms-play-file/directory/playlist etc. This way, which provides instant gratification, seems under-documented/advertised at least according to this Emacs SX question:
This is utterly a documentation issue but probably the first step is to decide which interaction style is to be preferred, if any!
---Fran