this article presents a novel indexing framework called emif (effective music indexing framework) to facilitate scalable and accurate content based music retrieval. emif system architecture is designed based on a "classification-and-indexing" principle and consists of two main functionality layers: 1) a novel semantic-sensitive classification to identify input music's category and 2) multiple indexing structures - one local indexing structure corresponds to one semantic category. emif's layered architecture not only enables superior search accuracy but also reduces query response time significantly. to evaluate the system, a set of comprehensive experimental studies have been carried out using large test collection and emif demonstrates promising performance over state-of-the art approaches.