Amie Street, one of our favorite new music distribution services (SellABand is up there, too), turns one year old today - we first wrote about them last year a couple of weeks after launching.
Amie Street’s business model is dead simple - Artists upload their music for download on the site. Users download songs, with the starting price at free. When downloads pick up for popular songs, the price starts to rise, all the way up to $0.99. If a song gets to $0.30 or so, you know its popular. The artist keeps 70% of revenues after the first $5 in sales. Songs are sold DRM-free in MP3 format. Users can also generate credit in Amie Street by recommending songs. Only a few recommendations are allowed, but if the song you promote does well, you get credit in your account that you can use to buy other songs.
Well known artists are starting to use the service. Barenaked Ladies, Master P, Romeo and the Meat Puppets are all distributing music on the site, which has now sold over half a million tracks to users.
To celebrate their birthday, Amie Street is giving the first 5,000 signups on the site $2.50 in free credit and five free song recommendations. Just use the promo code “TechCrunch.” Note that we are not receiving any compensation from this. Try it out if you like.
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Thanks for the great hook-up Michael. I’ll give them a try.
Thanks!! thats awesome. Great idea for a site!
Terrific! I had been meaning to sign up, and this was as good a reason to as any.
But why would someone buy the songs if they are available for free initially? would’nt some JoeSchmuck upload them to a torrent site or download site …any comments?
RandomRat, the same can be said for buying music in general. Why should I buy a CD when I can get it from BitTorrent? Sure, someone has to buy the CD, but the majority of us can just download it, right?
The reason why I like Amie Street is that I don’t want to steal, and if you give me an honest way to get music that I can use on whatever device I may own, then I’ll buy it. At least with Amie Street, smaller artists get a chance to have their work put out there, and make some change without the RIAA taking a big chunk.
Amie Street is one of the most interesting startups you’ve covered (ever).
I can’t say enough good things about them and I really hope this becomes mainstream.
Mike,
I’m with you, but how are we going to stop people from sharing the music (i know it’s not a question for you or me) . It’s become so easy to share anything these days - just think about this I’ll buy a song then post it to pownce (which techcrunch recently covered) and voila hundreds of people downloading it… I’m sure there are hundred different ways to do this, but how are they creating value when they are initially giving it out for free? May be it’s a good way for budding artists to publicize their music…
Great little promo for those guys. I remember you mentioning them with the BNL post and had kinda forgotten about it. There are some good music services out there with Pandora and this new distribution model. One word of warning I would be very careful to not ruffle the RIAA’s feathers, every time they have lost any control or power they try to squash the competition. Good luck to the Aimee street guys and the ‘new’ music industry in general.
Amie Street is a great idea and they are executing well. It really is in the top percentile of start-ups covered on TechCrunch as the bottom 90% are totally worthless.
RandomRat,
I understand the argument. I think that most smaller bands would much rather have their music stolen, or given away for free, in the hopes of getting their names out there, then to not sell any songs at a more expensive price. Of course, any popular bands would have their music up at the $.99 mark pretty quickly, so not many of their songs would be given away.
I am the type of person who is willing to buy the music, but only if it is reasonably priced, and if I’m not limited on my personal use of it. That is why I still buy CDs. If CDs didn’t come down in price, and I didn’t have any reasonably priced alternative, then I would be really tempted to steal the music.
I think many people who use bit torrent as their primary means of getting music are probably not going to buy much music anyway, even if it is priced well.
The gamble is whether there are more people willing to buy the music, then there are willing to steal the music. Of course, with faster connections, stealing music is getting easier and easier, I think that even though the movie industry is facing this same issue now, it it only going to get worse for them as connection speeds get better.
This is a pretty slick little idea. Great potential if it can have all the wannabe rockstars on myspace transfer their homemade albums over.
I’d like to see it pair with a pandora type idea to recommend music I’ve never heard of based off the styles of the big name bands I like. I find the recommendation part of the service pointless for helping me find music….site as a hole looks great though
Thanks Mike. Great idea..this could actually reduce piracy. People really don’t want to steal. Of course, this is not a justification!
agreed. i really like their algo and the fact that you get credits for “evangelizing” songs. its something i have always thought and written about happening in other areas of media. interesting idea and company.
It feels like just yesterday that I interviewed co-founder Joshua in NYC at the location of the first ever cappuchino machine.
http://www.centernetworks.com/.....amiestreet
I was very impressed with Joshua’s ability to define where Amie Street was going. I know they just moved to NYC and I look forward to being able to meetup in the near future.
Amie Street is a good example of fighting the beast (iTunes) and making a name for yourself.
Happy birthday!
Check out GRUUVE http://www.gruuve.com. I like this site better than Pandora because the recommendations are user generated, you can customize your playlists and put it on myspace. http://www.gruuve.com
Amie Street is a great service with a cool business model.
Go Bruno.
Amie Street has done a great job of selling and promoting our music. Cheers!
Website is very slow at the moment. Amie Street got TechCrunched?
I’m sorry, did you guys say sellaband.com? Next time, before promoting sites that rip-off naive artists and the easily dupable youth that support them, how about going through their terms and conditions? sellaband is a sham, read the fine print and crunch some numbers before promoting services just because they are different.
Happy b-day Amie!
“You Can’t Be Serious”: I’m sorry but I completely disagree. I’m a SellABand artist, I’ve read the fine print, and I don’t feel in any way to being ripped off. Also, there are already two bands there that already released albums, and both of them don’t feel like they were ripped off. Can you at least support your oppinion?
Make sure you read their privacy policy… It was not something I could agree too.
Awesome, I love Barenaked Ladies, Master P, Romeo and the Meat Puppets…I’ve looked at the terms of service of sellaband…doesn’t really appear to be a sham as long as the band themselves know what’s going on.
Yeap, I stop going there… I don’t like their privacy policy written. Sorry… You can’t collect my power
@You can’t be serious: if you’ve already done the number-crunching about Sellaband, why not indulge us?
For those who support the artists there is no other risk than that maybe they bought to many records, but they get a physical CD for every part invested. The funds are put in an escrow account, and can be withdrawn at any point up until the artist reaches the goal.
For the artists, yes, if they raise the money to record, print and publish an album themselves they might earn more than doing it through SAB. Or might not. In any case, they join because they can’t get those funds/that contract otherwise. Per CD sold the SAB artists get more than an ordinary release on a record company.
This is a cool site. Just registered. There are a lot of good artists on here. I’m very surprised not to see crap from wanna bes.
Just bought my very, very first MP3. Love the site and looking forward to browsing it further.
thanks, but no thanks…
i still use good ol’ free morpheus.
I want to congratulate AmieStreet on this great accomplishment. We made a deal with them a few months ago that allows us to use featured artists from AmieStreet in lonelygirl15 videos. I know that the musicians we have been in touch with and the fans on our site that have legally downloaded the music are all grateful for AmieSteet. Congrats!
Lonely girl videos are such a waste of time. I feel so sorry for people caught up in your little soapbox.
Happy fourth of July.
Thats Sweet! Just registered and got my 250 cents
!
Cheers!
very cool idea for a music site.
Yeah great innovative model -
- Hope they make it big .. and sell out to their dreams not - money.
Thanks. I’ve been wanting to try Amie Street out. I’m happy.
sucks