Barenaked Ladies: New Album. Free. No DRM. Now.

This is indeed, a disruptive business model - and a novel way for non mainstreamers and newbies to get their product tried by a new audience

Barenaked Ladies - great group.

When it comes to music and it’s transfer over internet mediums, it’s not how it’s originally dispersed but the momentum that carries it through torrents and other file sharing programs. Barenaked Ladies - courageous move forward!

The site is really slow right now, especially with the player constantly trying to load itself.

You can still grab the tracks from their album free (not for long though) at http://amiestreet.com/barenakedladies

i don’t like the model.

i prefer a single fixed price/song - just like apple’s
why should popularity of a song affect price/download?
doesn’t make sense to me

if someone likes a song - it’s not like a price diff. of 20cents and 75cents will determine if they’ll buy it. even at it’s full retail (lol) of 98cents - the consumer will still instantly buy it if they like it.

for me, i could care less either way - i get my songs free from ‘zorpheus’
note: letter has been changed for legalese bs

I pre-ordered the BNL CD when it was still in production, and got myself a real, shiny, physical disc. Completely worth it for a brilliant CD. To download at this price, DRM free, is also fantastic.

Love this model! Record labels do not have a future with online music - there control will become significantly less over time.

Finially all bands globally can sell their music online and be a worldwide success without a record deal.

You are right, the Barenaked Ladies are “Men”. But their new album is called “Are Me”.

Nope, it’s Men. The “Me” album came out in September. “Men” came out last month.

Site is dead - I think TechCrunch users overloaded their servers!

Amie St is great for bands though I am worried about the industry as a whole. According to many reports the RIAA is pushing for higher royalties to be paid for streaming music online (Pandora) and in effect is threatening to shut many of them down with this. I have found many bands I never would of found with Pandora and the thought of loosing that is irritating. Gizmodo has been going crazy lately with Boycott the Riaa talk and it seems like its starting to get some feet. I welcome Amie St and anything else thats positive in the music community, there isn’t much positive news out there.

Sorry about that guys, just upgrading our servers, be back in a sec!

Mike,

why not invest in Amie St. They are a nice bunch of guys with a defined and interesting business model. You have written about them here for the umpteenth time. At least, your support will assist them keep their servers up and running whenever they get a Techcrunch multi-postreview.

Barenaked Ladies suck…this is their last dying gasp.

Damn…the site was down and I haven’t been able to download the songs yet. They are now up to $0.26 each. Bummer. I should have downloaded first, then posted.

price based on popularity will hurt no-name artists, obviously. I guess they all have to start pumping bubble gum music to get mass appeal in order to put food on the table.

Vic - the company actually asked me to be on their advisory board (like a lot of other startups) but I declined. I want to keep writing about them without any conflicts at all. I think that what they are doing is important and awesome.

Oh yeah, Amie St doesn’t have a chance…with models like Tamago, you get paid for participation. The only thing you get from Amie St. is crap music, while the the cost of bandwidth won’t ever cover their cost.

Also, with Tamago, artist release multiple formats at multiple prices; and license it so that you can use some as mashups. Oh yeah, they get to set and change the price; there’s no trick of them keeping 70% of nothing. Hell, even with iTunes, no name artist get a better deal.

Berlin and Lemon Obrien, the way our algorithm works, “no-name” artists don’t get hurt, it’s just the opposite. At all times, we try to price a song low enough so that it has the greatest chance of being bought/discovered and high enough so that the artist can make money for themselves.

Think about it this way: would you be more likely to buy a track by Au Revoir Simone when it was free or 98 cents? Free. And then you would realize that they are a SICK band, and you would probably recommend it so your friends would buy it, and then when people were more comfortable with the band/brand, the price can rise so the artist makes money.

Elias - don’t worry about lemon. He’s our resident grump.

“Barenaked Ladies suck…this is their last dying gasp.”

Hahha, so true. I couldn’t agree more.

Irrespective of the biz model, what about this DRM-free aspect, does that mean as soon as one has bought a song he/she can share it with all friends? Although I like the possibility of no DRM, anonymous people in front of a PC are not quite a welfare institution, so P-2-P services will find a legal revival and the music initially downloaded for zero cents will be distributed in no time all over the world. Let’s hope that concert revenues will be ok for the bands and artists.

I think it’s an interesting idea, and hats off to those who decide to try it, but I agree more with Berlin than Elias on how the model affects the low-volume ‘niche’ artist.

I believe I am roughly 0% likely to try music from Au Revoir Simone at 0 cents/track unless I know something about them or I have nothing but time on my hands. And the price of the tracks certainly doesn’t recommend them too highly, so strike two.

Normally the more specialized the product I buy, the more I’m willing to pay for it. With music it is almost always the case that more popular albums are cheaper, with more used albums in circulation. They tend to be in the $5 range. For others, I am willing to pay around $25, not because it’s popular, but precisely because it’s not.

I do understand that the marginal distribution costs get lower with popularity sometimes in the disc business and that has an effect. And with downloads, that effect is mostly absent. But still, I don’t see smaller independent artists with devoted followings doing well at all in this model. I could tell every friend I have that Of Montreal or Destroyer is a great listen, but they’re not going to like it and they’re not going to buy it. It’s a specialized piece of work that doesn’t appeal to everyone, sometimes I wonder why I like it.

Anyway, truly, best of luck. I could be dead wrong, but even if I’m 100% right, the model would work for certain types of music, and as we move out of the old mold I think Amie should do well as a part of the new order.

Well the no DRM part is enough to spark up the interest.

“downloadable in DRM-free MP3 format” - I wonder if they’ll make the music available in a higher-quality format, such as DRM-free AAC format? I think there is a tendency in the media to tout MP3 as “DRM-free”, often implying that other, better, audio formats are hobbled with DRM, which they are not!

Paul, totally hear you on that. aac, ogg, etc. are on the way.

Come on, this is so not a news.

There are already THOUSANDS of free albums without DRMs. You can check the biggest archive here :

http://www.jamendo.com/

@Morgan This site is waaaay better than Amie St.

@Elias — um…will the price be different for different low/hi quality formats? And, really, why are you doing this…aac is Apple’s fairplay, and ogg is for people who are too nerdy to actualy listen to anything other than Pink Floyd while programing linux.

@lemon, if you wanna argue formats, know your stuff before spreading around FUD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding

AAC != Fairplay

lemon: What do you mean? aac is just a codec, fairplay is drm that Apple encrypts its music files with. You can have a file encoded in aac without using Apple’s drm.

Personally, I think its stupid that you are even whining about having the option to choose your format. Who cares if you don’t want ogg, having it available doesn’t force you into using it… does it?

As for if it will be more expensive, I am not with Amie Street, so I don’t know, but if aac is better quality at smaller sizes (which I think is the point of it), then why would it be more expensive? The only thing that would justify a price hike is if it was a larger size (like flac).

Is there anyway to browse Tamago without downloading and installing their software? It looks kind of like a scam.. and is there any way to buy stuff at any time or does the actual artist have to be online for me to buy from them (and does that limit the amount of stuff to sell to how long I am actually online… so if i was touring, and wouldn’t have the ability to leave a computer on 24 hours a day people wouldn’t be able to buy my music) Maybe I am missing the whole point of it though.. the site is kind of confusing.

AmieStreet is the coolest and most innovative business model to come out in so long and this is so awesome to see a company pull in the big dogs like this.

I don’t understand the fifth comment when he said he can’t understand the model. What’s not to understand? Every song starts free. As more people purchase the song, the price goes up. Price represents quality in this situation. The higher the price, the more people like the song.

And it’s a case of ‘I wish I thought of that first’.

Wow… something that has potential to replace allofmp3 … nice

@lemon He meant Flac.

@nick Why pay more (besides the obvious reason of a “premium” service) ? The economics are there. Sure it’s not as cheap as an MP3, but it’s still really cheap. The end game is you can download in any format you like at any quality you like.

@alex Yes exactly. It’s not a popularity contest. The price is a quality metric.

These guys recently presented at the NY Tech Meetup. Good Concept and a good group of young guys with the drive to make it work, i expect to see a buyout in their near future.

interesting model.. but why would a friend recommend that his/her friends go to the website to pay and d/l if they can just provide the tracks to them for free, since it is drm-free?

Nettwerk Music Group also seems to have a deal with Joost.com. You can watch clips with Joost.

barenaked ladies peaked long ago.

aime’s model is sort of like an IPO, i wonder if there will be a secondary market where one can sell back your shares? hmm…

i’ll stick to the hassle-free DRM model from itunes. 99 cents. click, click, click. then play. never before was it so easy to get popular music.

i should add. i like amie’s model - especially for young bands looking for exposure. and if offering barenaked ladies or gin blossoms or whomever from that sing-along period can bring more visibility to aimestreet i think that’s great!

but i’m down with DRM because it has made acquiring music easy for me in popular formats: pc, ipod, cd. though the quality of itunes is not true CD, a nice soundcard, speakers at home, an ipod in between, and a bose car stereo on the road makes up for it.

i don’t care that i can’t load a itunes track on my phone and camera and watch and playstation, and….

Perfect model, I would easily pay $.99 for DRM free tracks. Then - look at this Free at first!, how Viral is that!

- Amazing model, Rb

I think only part of the story is being heard here, the business model behind selling music. BNL and other big bands are moving away from the Corporate Disc sellers and creating and usgin their own distribution centers, like Amie St. BNL, for instance owns all of it song rights, not the record company, they can sell the songs to who ever and where ever they want. Word of mouth can make bands, look at plenty of them coming out of sites like myspace, utube and others. Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, a non triditional touring band, does not use a distribution deal, yet whenever they release a new CD, it will hit #1 on Billboard Interent sales. They don’t have a big record deal, and they sell out at every show they play.

The current model that the RIAA is trying to protect is in the last gasps of it dying breaths. They are in the business of selling disc’s, little pieces of plastic. The artists are nothing more then what they put on the plastic that they sell. As more and more artistes realize they can end run the Big Label, they will become more and more desparate to change laws and try to force out the new guys.

Last, one of the big labels, I don’t remember which, is starting to remove the DRM from all their music. They are having issues with music purchased on sites like iTunes, and the user cannot play it on anything other then thier iPods.

is it just me or is the site totally and utterly not coping with getting techcrunched? not a good sign for them and not being able to scale. shame - really fancied the album!

pwn3d!

T o Lemon and Berlin, Since Amie Street has come to the ey of the music world, exactly what your talking about has not happened. I can tell right now just from the first few lines you have yet to spend any time looking at the site or listening to any music. When the site comes back up you will talk a different tune. If your minds dont change thats OK. I hope you both have a great day and a better day tommrow.

@Dwiz — “When the site comes back up you will talk a different tune.”

ummm yeah. I don’t even think I’ll respond; but, you should check out Tamago. Its pretty cool compared to Amie St. First, it ain’t a website. Its p2p software running on your computer, like Joost, and it turns it into a media store hooked up to everyone else. Kinda like a distributed iTunes, but not the same interface. What’s cool, is you get paid for distributing, and you get paid when you publish stuff….anything if it sells.

Not only I can’t get the BNLs, I can’t get to their site’s home. I wish I knew about this before you Michael. Oh that’s right, that’s why I come here. Damn!

Elias when are you guys back up?

@ Stan (37). I’ll also use iTunes. But what’s popular is dictated by others, hence popular. There’s always some song that’s not popular, but that I like alot. So because others feel that the BNLs are no longer popular, that doesn’t make their music (or other bands) enjoyable.

@ MTRGoose (40). Agree. That’s what some artists are doing with Musictoday. They eventually want to sell all their music and wares using their own distribution. Cut out the middle man (labels).

Hey Ed, sorry about that, hopefully we’ll be in better shape soon. When that does happen, enter promo code “ruth” when you sign up, so you can get some free money to put towards the BNL album

Lemon its cool site . I still like Amie Street better. Ive spent so many hours listening to artist I’ve never heard before. Al ot that were recommended by other Amie Street users. I was never a fan of I tunes since I like hearing music from someone ive never heard before. Thats the biggest and best thing about AMie Street to me. So many times ive gone to a house party orjust hanging out with friends driving around and put on a mix of music from AMie Street that 99 percent of the people have never heard and more often then not the response is “who is this, where did you hear of it from, and whats the site address” Other times i just play music directly form Amie Street’s music player. I really dont see how with I tunesa rtist get a better deal. With the size of their music library dont the small fish get lost in a huge sea? I beleive you wouldnt be so negative about Amie Street if you spent some time on it. Do you have some sort of Investment in the site your talking to highly of? Excuse my lack of spelchecking. Im a horrible typist

@MTRGoose

I so agree with you about the Riaa failed model. This site and ones like it will allow the artists to actually make a little money on their hard work. Kudos to people with the will to try new things.

Another thing to think of is that there is a lot of good music out there that doesn’t hit the mainstream. This kind of thing should really help those groups.

@lemon o brian

You sir, are retarded. Pray we never meet.

@Ed (46)

true.

so many of these web 2.0 businesses are built on back of the content contributors. aime could be the same.

instead of a 70% take of proceeds, why not offer the artist a choice: take the money now, or take stock in the company?

by giving stock, the artists that helped build the company will benefit from a future equity event. and if the stock is given using a vesting model, it also gives the artist an incentive to stick around for the big payola and not leave for a big label deal.

aime is in this for profit. one has to wonder: are they truly looking to even the playing field for artists? or, have they came up with a new spin to break the itunes juggernaut for the record companies?

if aime does become a disruptor, then they will eventually be acquired by the big bad record industry. then, it’s business as usual.

aime, make sure you take care of the artists that built your company.

i wish both aimestreet.com and their artists future success. rock on!

Hey Stan, from my REALLY limited understanding of securities laws, giving artists stock instead of royalty payments could create serious legal problems (i.e. they are not accredited investors, etc.). As for being part of business as usual, check out our photo here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006.....sic-model/

I don’t know that we would fit in particularly well in corporate America We’ll do the right thing.

@dwiz - I’m an artist, and use Tamago, along with many others.

I vote with my dollars…bought the whole album–unheard.

Your first reaction will probably be: what a dumbsh1t. Maybe so. But I am so sick of the BS by RIAA and online music stores. I just want music, unencumbered by ridiculous digital shackles.

I tried iTunes, didn’t back up my library, PC caved, lost my purchases (don’t bother telling me how to retrieve them; I’m past that now). No more purchases from iTunes for me. Or any other DRM-laden store for that matter.

Somebody is doing something about the craziness. Giving me a convenient way to purchase music and listen to it on my iPod, Sonos, PC, and wherever else I damn choose. And for that I’ll pay to play.

Keep ‘em coming, Amie Street.

Great idea, altough there are already a lot of free albums without DRMs

Lemon, then as an artist what is it about Amie Street that you dont like. Its a singular meeting place for fans of all music to that ahs a great intergrated system for finding music.AS an artist i thinkg its the fact you would be scared your music wouldnt sell. That is the only reason anyone would not want to join AMie Street, that and being lazy. Why dont you put a song or 2 up. Also Tamago is that anything like BurnLounge?

I would buy BNL music, if I was going to buy any music at all. But I can’t. I’m a pirate at heart. Thanks for the music, BNL. Hahahaha. Arrrrr!

with almost no requests for the songs, the price has already shot to the max price of .98 per song. seems inconsistent with their business model.

Nice site. You are doing a great service to the web