AmieStreet.com - New Social Music Download Service

There's an interesting new music download service out there that's come up with an ingenious way to combine social networking into its business model. Here's the beginning of an article from the Washington Post:

Amazon leads investment in music site AmieStreet

By Yinka Adegoke
Reuters
Monday, August 6, 2007; 1:12 AM

NEW YORK (Reuters) -AmieStreet, a digital music site that prices songs of new artists according to their popularity, said on Monday that Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN.O) is leading a first round of investment in the start-up.

Started last October by three Brown University graduates, AmieStreet allows musicians to post songs with a variable pricing model, which is different from the one-price model used by Apple Inc.'s (AAPL.O) popular iTunes Music Store.

A new song on AmieStreet.com is initially priced at zero cents. The song is automatically given a starting price after users begin to download the song. The price rises gradually with popularity, to a maximum of 98 cents.

That's a pretty interesting concept and could easily turn the buying of music into an addictive game. I can imagine people (like myself perhaps) checking the site constantly to see what new music has been added so they can get it for free or nearly free. When I was checking out the site at first, I noticed a few tracks by Tara McLean, a local artist who I've read a lot about over the years but I've never really heard much of her music. So I clicked on a few of her tracks to download, and by the time I had finished skimming the terms of service and signed up, the price on her tracks had already gone up and I was no longer able to get them for free. If you have to act that fast on a site that's just beginning to make a name for itself, imagine how quick you'll have to jump on the freebies once the membership grows.

Another very interesting aspect of Amie Street is that recommending tracks can actually earn you credit on the site. Here's how it works. Each time you buy a track (even if it's free) you get the chance to make a recommendation. And when you sign up with a prepaid package, you get a certain amount of recommendation opportunities included. Whenever a song you recommended goes up in price, you earn what they call "street cred". So if you recommend a song while it's free and it later goes up to 98 cents, you've earned 98 cents worth of street cred/store credit which you can use for the purchase of other music.

That whole street cred business is very clever marketing. It makes users feel good about their musical tastes when they're early champions of a song that rises in popularity, which makes them feel good about the site to boot, plus it maintains an alternative/underground persona for Amie Street itself. Genius! I wish I'd thought of it. My three-week marketing course makes me an expert, naturally, so I predict big things will come from this idea.

The fact that Amazon's on board gives Amie Street some cred of its own and bodes well for its future. And since Amazon is planning to unveil its own paid download service soon, I wonder if they'll borrow the Amie Street model for their own service?

The big drawback for Amie Street right now is that the site isn't very impressive (who am I to talk?) and neither is the repertoire of artists. The only big name act I could see while browsing around was the Cardigans, while everything else was unknown indie bands, but I suspect that will change before long. I have nothing against indie bands, but I don't have time to sift through every single song ever recorded by indie acts to find the diamonds in the rough. And the other thing that sucks is that there's no affiliate program* for people like me to make money by linking to them. Rats. A five percent cut on a 3 cent purchase would cause Dynamic Range Radio's total revenue so far to jump about 12,000 percent.




* I stand corrected.

A few days after writing this post, I was trying to re-install Google Ads into my new web design since the standard Google template looked butt-ugly beside my new color scheme. So as I was tinkering with the ad layouts, I noticed that the Google Ads referral system had a whole bunch of new or new-ish options I'd never noticed before. In the past, you were only able to use referral ads for Firefox and a few other Google services like Ad Sense and Ad Words, but now there's a whole slew of companies you can choose to refer, and Amie Street is one of them. I would never recommend a product I haven't used or have no knowledge of, but I did find a few companies I have dealt with in the past, or at least done some investigating into and heard good things about. So, long story short-ish, I added a section called "Dynamic Range Radio Recommends" to the sidebar which should include rotating links to services like Amie Street, Vista Print, Firefox, and others. It seems to be working properly, but I'll be monitoring it closely over the next few weeks to make sure it doesn't insert ads for companies I have no knowledge of and/or am not willing to endorse.