Is Amie Street the future of online music?
As previoulsy posted it seems the music downloading space has undergone a mini seizmic change in the last few days which suggests a move toward the sale of DRM-free music by the big labels. About frickin’ time!
In our opinion as stated numerous times before this progression is ineveitable and I think we have seen potentially the future of music downloading at Amie Street. These guys seem to have a very very interesting new model helping people to find new music from up and coming artists.
How about this - Artists can upload their music for promotion and sale. Users form social networks with friends, listen to, and purchase music. All songs are DRM-free in MP3. Songs appear to be at 192kpbs quality level, although it may just be whatever the artist uploads. All songs are free to start. Prices fluctuate over time based on demand for the song - currently the highest priced song is $0.36. 273 songs have been uploaded so far. This demand based pricing model seems like a really innovative way to sell music.
Users can search, browse and listen to streaming music for free. If you’ve purchased a song you can recommend it to your friends using a limited number of “rec’s” that you get when you purchase dollars in your account. Once recommended, users will get account credit if the price of the song increases, giving them an incentive to find and recommend good music.
If you REC a song at 1 cent or above Amie Street will pay you half of the difference in the prices. So, if you REC a song at 10 cents, and it ends up at 90 cents, they will pay you 40 cents (half of the 80 cents difference).
If you REC a song while it is still free (0 cents), and it ends up at 98 cents, they will deposit 98 cents into your Amie Account. Amie Street pays you more for RECing a song while it is still free because you take more of a risk and because we want everyone on Amie Street to be RECing those great undiscovered songs.
Artists keep 70% of proceeds after $5 in sales. They are not required to sell their music exclusively through Amie Street, and can remove it at any time.
This model sounds like it has been really well considered and very innovative. Since the vast majority of bands are not concerned with people stealing their music - they just want people to listen to it - Amie Street could be a great way for them to promote their stuff.
Amie Street is one to watch!