Social music marketplace Amie Street has closed a Series A round of financing led by Amazon.com, along with some new partnerships and a site redesign. The amount of Amazon’s investment and the terms are not disclosed.
We’ve been big fans of the model and the recent investment shows Amazon is too. On Amie Street, music is not sold for a flat rate, but rather fluctuates based on demand for the song. Artists upload their music (DRM free), which users can download at a starting price of free. As a song’s downloads increase, 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. SellABand also has a socially driven music monetization model.
Users are rewarded for recommending hit songs with credit for purchasing additional music on Amie Street. The more popular a song becomes after a member has recommended it, the more credit he or she receives to spend on music.
New partners include RoyaltyShare, INgrooves, Daptone Records, and United For Opportunity (UFO) are new labels working with Amie Street. The addition of the partners has expanded Amie Street’s music library over 1000%. The site redesign’s major change has been the addition of a personalized music home page that includes a music “news feed” that helps you track your friend’s recommended songs, new releases from your favorite bands, and even predicts songs you may like based on previous activity.
The company has now grown to 12 people and out of their Long Island house to office space in Long Island city.
No doubt, Amazon’s recent payments system seems an ideal fit for the site as well.
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Not too interested in Amie street, although it is a great model.
The Amazon webpay is very interesting though. I am really curious to see how this works once they get started using their system.
Interesting to think that this company got financed by one of its service providers.
Lucas/Elias — congrats on your round!! Only thing that can make the news better is a killer API
{aka}
Nick, I do believe the “ceiling” for popular songs is 98¢, not 99… Something about undercutting iTunes and eMusic on a per-track basis.
Congrats on the round guys! Looking forward to the new features. It would be nice to have other payment options in addition to PayPal. I’m a fan of Google Checkout, but Amazon’s Flexible Payment Service looks like it will be a good option as well.
I like how they separate “free”, “bargains”, and “popular” tracks in “my home” and break out albums under $6 on the “today” page.
Keep up the great work guys!
Aren’t they based in Providence, Ri and not Long Island, NY according to crunchbase?
Who gives a rat’s ass? And what the hell does this have to do with Portland, or Oregon, or even the Pacific Northwest?
This is an awesome idea. Congrats to Amie Street for closing series A.
I’d like to see the same model be applied to music…
I think Amie Street need to have a long hard look at this company:
http://www.digonex.com/
which produced this website early on in the 00’s
http://www.musicrebellion.com
This patent they hold is also VERY similar to what amie street do around pricing.
http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/w.....SPLAY=DESC
Congrats on the round however!!!!
Hearty Congrats Amie Street.
You are rocking the music world in a new way
I’m sorry… I meant to movies!
Go the ST domain! Oh wait they are .com now, however the amie.st domain still works with a redirect
The main thing I didn’t like about Amie Street is that if you want to buy an album, you have to pay for each song. They should cap it out at 7-10 dollars like iTunes (1 song for 98 cents and the album is either the price of all the songs or no more than 7-10 dollars, whichever is cheapest).
Congrats to Aimee Street - great idea and execution!
Nobody within the value chain of music creation is going to survive on selling songs for $.99 cents or less. After 30% is carved off to the digital music platform/distributor, there’s not much left over to justify making and promoting music. I tell friends, imagine if in 2006 all cars sold for around $15,000, and then in 2007 consumers decided they would only pay $1,000 or less for a car (or just the wheels and tires), and 50% of the car buying public just decided to steal cars all together! This is the music industry and digital music, and unless your band is U2-sized, you cannot survive on $.69 cents of margin, t-shirts, banner ads and touring revenue. The small and medium-sized players are getting annihilated, and the larger players are merging and contracting to reach some sort of economic equilibrium. It’s not pretty; the industry needs high-margin, high-volume products to fund the development of unproven artists and to survive in general. I have a solution.
I wrote a somewhat similar business plan to this over the winter, but trashed it on account of the difficulty raising funding for an entertainment-based venture. The partnerships and funding Amie Street has established are impressive ans should serve them well, and I wish them the best of luck!
And Bruce, I’m not quite sure what part of the music industry you’re referring to, but in the independent/small label world (which it seems is what Amie Street is aimed at, at least initially), getting the songs out there is far more important than the profit margins–the bands make so little off the music itself that it hardly matters. Most band income comes from playing shows and selling merch. Sure, the label may prefer to make higher margins, but in a lot of cases they’ll recognize that places like Amie Street, MySpace, PureVolume, LastFM, etc will serve to benefit them greatly in the long run.
I go back to a spinoff of Seth Godin’s concept of the Purple Cow–if you create something truly extraordinary, it’s your own damn fault if it doesn’t get you noticed, especially with so many free marketing outlets available on the internet.
Ty - “Most band income comes from playing shows and selling merch.” I always put this challenge to people that make that statement. Send me a list of 100 unsigned bands that make a living wage from touring and merch. Yup, labels need higher margin products, but as every band can now be a label - and do it all on their own, they also need high margin / high volume products other than shirts just to put gas in the van. If Amie Street, MySpace, PureVolume, LastFM, etc. are the only businesses making money, lots of great music is never going to be created. Passion does not pay the bills!
Hey Bruce, what’s your great idea for high volume/high profits? $80 CD’s?
amie street is the bomb.
(close your eyes if you don’t want to witness big time pimpage. open your ears if you want to hear some beautiful lungs at work)
http://amiestreet.com/mollymcginn
Sweet deal for Amie Street - and a smooth move on Amazon’s part.
The concept is pretty good. There is a recent trend online to take what used to be called pyrmaid schemes and putting the model to valid uses. Incetivising users to listen and give feedback on new music will definately help small bands get started.
There is a site called PeerIt that takes Amie Street’s concept to the next level. They actually pay each buyer for sharing music via PayPal. So if you buy early you make more. Its a monetized bittorrent model. They do anything digital, not just music, not sure of PeerIt has gotten funded yet.
http://www.peerit.com
Congrats Elias. Kick ass non DRM site. Glad to see its doing so well.