Also, it’s not $5 per album, it’s $5 per song.

That means if your album has 15 songs, Amiestreet needs to make $75 before you even start seeing anything (assuming people aren’t just buying 1 hot song). That’s a lot of 9 to 19 cent downloads… and then you need even more if you want to earn anything.

Manipulating people’s money perceptions has to be number one way of shaping their behaviour. This is what the AS model works upon. No algorithm is going to defeat this for effectiveness. So at least one of the commenters is failing to see the wood…

Using Amie Street is the first time I’ve ever parted with $ for songs on the internet. And a big proportion of my small spending of those $ has gone to some really small artists (like Dark Dark Dark). How many other models would have allowed this?

My partner is considering uploading some of her music. What is the most her friends will pay collectively to AS for the service before they are helping put food on her table (and strings on her guitar) ? $5. big whoop

After re-reading your posts, I’m beginning to understand your criticisms of the pricing system from the artist’s perspective.

If each song must make $5 before the artist begins to earn any money, and most of the “decent” but not particularly popular songs top out at -.19 USD then the Amiestreet is making money, but not the artist. And while paying that low amount is great for the consumer, it’s not so great that the artist won’t see much of a return from it.

And the wealth of artists being added to the site only increases the chances of songs topping out at low (or lower) prices. The “decent” music deserves to see a financial return just as much as the popular music.

Amiestreet works from the consumer’s perspective, and for the person (like me) in search of indie music, but I can understand how it’s not full-stop solution for the artists.

Thanks for your insights into the matter. I hope they can come up with a solution that works for everyone.

I think you’re missing my points.

Point #1 — Indie artists aren’t losing sales to P2P. Our stuff isn’t largely distributed P2P. Major label artists are. That trickles down, in turn, and many many less indie artists are being offered major opportunities since the majors can’t afford to take as many swings and misses, now that they’re bleeding so much money to P2P.

I lose more money (BY FAR) from my fans going to Amazon to buy my album (instead of to my own site, or CD Baby), than I do to P2P networks. Brick and mortar retail record stores, the same thing. Now, I throw Amie Street into that category, too. Except they don’t even have the justification of having three middle men to pay, the way a traditional retail outlet does. They’ll just pay me next to nothing because that’s their business model.

Point #2 — Even if P2P was the problem I was trying to “combat”, as you say . . . I don’t think Amie Street really is offering an alternative to P2P. It’s mostly sanctioned P2P.

Point #3 — I don’t like it. And so I don’t use it, as you suggest. But that doesn’t mean that the model doesn’t still harm me (and my kind). Just as P2P has lowered the expectation that one should pay for music, destinations like Amie Street will now legitimize those lowered expectations.

Let me reiterate. This is essentially the same as P2P. It’s just that you (the “buyer”) feel better about using it. That’s legitimizing the expectation that artists don’t get any money for the time and energy and expense that went into their recording. And that: “if you want to remain in the music industry as an artist you just can’t focus on CD sales in this day and age. TOUR! TOUR! TOUR!”

Well no shit. I tour my ass off. And I make a good living from it. And just this afternoon, I had to decide whether we were gonna add a string section to one of the songs on my current production. All told, it’ll cost me close to $1000 for that artistic decision. Tell me how many .03 downloads of that song I’m gonna have to sell to justify that decision, financially? The answer: almost exactly the same number as the number of P2P traded copies that get stolen.

As for the usefulness of their recommendation engines goes. I’m sure it will get better as more artists get added, and as the data points rise. I’m less interested in a technological solution to discovering new music, and more interested in what social features get developed that really encourage people to share what they’ve discovered in an easy, intuitive, and affective way.

Which leads me to:

@Muhammad

I’m thrilled to hear you’ve been using Amie Street to discover new stuff. And I’m totally open to the notion that Amie Street has grown in usefulness in that regard. I’m sure they’re still a work in progress. My sense from my conversations with them is that they weren’t particularly serious in that area of development. But, hell, maybe I’ve got them all wrong. I hope they put as much effort and energy and creativity into nurturing that side of the business, as they’ve put into their promotion of the site to consumers. That’s the part that genuinely helps indies.

I would venture to speculate, though, that you’re the sort of cutting edge adventurer who combs through the internet filtering out the valuable articles, videos, blogs, and music for all your friends. I would guess you’re towards that edge of the spectrum, and not typical of the average music appreciator. More power to you. Here’s hoping that Amie Street (and other services) make it easier and more accessible for more and more people to comb the outer edges, without having to feel like they’re being adventurous.

I do appreciate the discussion of this stuff . . . all of y’all. I’m sorry if I’ve come off soap-boxy. I’m really just trying to sort through all the rapid changes the industry is making, just like all of y’all are. I appreciate all the contradictory perspectives . . . they help me get the whole picture. I just felt it was important to offer the perspective of a working musician.

I’ve gotta say, I can’t agree with your opinion of the Amie Street’s model. I’ve been a regular user of the site since it was first mentioned here on Techcrunch — and by regular, I mean that I visit the site at least twice a week to look for new music.

I can’t begin to tell you how many new artists I’ve discovered through the site, and I attribute all to the the pricing model, the user REC & reward system, the social features, and the automated recommendation.

You’re assuming that just because there’s a lot of artist’s music on the site people will only browse what’s popular and not go discovering. That’s simply not true. One of the great incentives to go browsing is that you’ll probably find something you like and get it for free, and even earn credit to buy more popular music if you decide it’s worth recommending.

I —and many other people— regularly check the ‘recently added’, ‘buzzing’, and ‘popular’ sections of the genre’s we like.

Honestly, the ‘recently added’ section is the first place I go to when I’m on the site so I can see what’s new and cheap that I might like. And when we find something we like, we buy it and/or REC it, letting everyone else know this is something worth checking out.

I fail to see how this isn’t good for the artist. Every artist gets to throw up their music at no costs with the possibility of making money. And people like me, looking for new artists to discover and become fans of, get rewarded with good indie music for a reasonable price while helping spread the word about those we like.

As for AmieStreet’s mission, think about it this way: Would you rather have your music distributed for FREE p2p or make $___ as you get more and more popular? I think the answer is pretty simple.

AmieStreet offers an alternative for the “illegal” filesharing that everybody is trying to combat today. Can you really complain about an alternative to potentially make money? If you don’t like it, don’t use it.

Either way, if you want to remain in the music industry as an artist you just can’t focus on CD sales in this day and age. TOUR! TOUR! TOUR! If you’re good, it’ll pay off in the end.

-Adam

Amie Street claims that their model “helps spread the word” by lower the barrier to entry . . . that because people can download the song for almost free, those people will go exploring new music. But from a collection of hundreds of thousands of unknown artists (which is how large the pool of indie artists is), are you gonna go randomly BUYING new tracks cause they only cost you a nickel? Is it that cost that’s prohibited you from randomly exploring new artists?

No . . . it’s that you don’t want to filter through all the crap to find what you like.

Other services are making an honest effort to solve the signal-to-noise ratio problem, and help steer people towards new music they might like. Pandora, Rhapsody, LastFM are all much much better solutions than Amie Street. Search “discover new music” . . . there’s a million sites trying to solve this dilemma.

Amie Street, in my approximation, isn’t even really trying to solve that problem. They are claiming to try and solve it because they realize that one of the “barriers to entry” for their own foreseen customer base is GUILT . . . fans asking themselves: Gee, if I bought this entire album for $.49 cents on Amie Street instead of for $9.99 on iTunes, am I screwing my favorite starving artist?

Honestly, my first thought when I heard about Amie Street was that it must be one of those eastern block MP3 websites that is just selling pirated MP3s. I’m sure I’m not the only one to wonder how they could sell music so cheaply.

That, to me, is why Amie Street gives all the lip service that they do that their model is helping indies. They have to assuage the guilt and fears of their customers . . . who, believe it or not, do actually care about the artists they listen to. They only want to screw the big guys, and steal from the majors. It doesn’t work that way, of course . . . but that’s the mentality.

@Indie Artist I tend to completely agree with the majority of what you are saying. The Orchard are a large organisation which seems to not know where they are headed.

In terms of Amie Street the site is a good idea and it is already party owned by Amazon. However, there business model doesnt really help indie artists, because it just flogs their music out as cheap as possible. It is helping spread the word, but there needs to be middle ground.

Im from a company called http://routenote.com, we just launched our service that is kind of similar to what CDBaby is offering (but without upfront fees), better than the Orchard (because we take less of a cut) and better than TuneCore (because no upfront fees).

Our services are growing every day and we are always looking for new markets to take our content to.

RouteNote is FREE to signup, FREE to upload and distribute your music, you keep 100% ownership, forward looking partners, can leave whenever you want, and you can still sign to a record label!!

So why dont you head over to RouteNote and give us a try.

Thanks for alerting me to those vendors, but BMat & DoubleV3 both accommodate collaborative filtering as well and this is an advantage that they can do popularity recommendation (collaborative filtering) as well as user intrinsic music taste (content-base recommendation). Both BMat & DoubleV3 had originated from University R&D projects and their personnels are still connect to those R&D teams/colleagues that they left behind in academia when they went into business. This means that you see their technology evolve with new researches coming out of their former colleagues.

I am impressed with BMat that they have a functionality for signal source separation (a.k.a cocktail party problem), ie, the different signal in a song can be completely isolated into its independent signal components (drumming , keyboard, lead vocal, bass guitar, etc…). After this separation, then I can search the database based on a particular drumming , bass guitar tune, etc… as my query to retrieve songs which have similar drumming beats or bass guitar tunes , etc…

Signal Source separation is quite new in the domain of digital signal processing which the algorithms are modeled on how human’s ability to filter out unwanted components in a noisy environment. Eg, if you’re in a cocktail party and standing in a corner chatting a beautiful girl (or a guy) , your ears thru the filtering process in the brain only allows the voice component of the person you’re chatting to, to be processed and all the unwanted signals/conversations coming in from different direction in the cocktail noisy room are being identified by the brain and filtered out. The brain only process the signal component that is interested in listening to. Now machine can do this capability via algorithmic ways and one of those popular source separation algorithm is ICA (Independent Component Analysis).

There are a few short videos here at TechCrunch mainly with interviews in shows or conferences that are quite noisy (background), ie, too many people are talking from the background that makes it impossible to hear the interviewer from the TechCrunch guy (usually Mike) and the interviewee. ICA is used to remove such noise from the background, leaving the filtered processed video makes the interview sounds like it had been done in the studio with complete quietness. So, BMat is using source separation to enhance their music recommender/retrieval system in a way similar to what I have described. (There is an online demo of this, using audio sounds, but I can’t post the link to it or at least more than 2 links per message, since the TechCrunch spamfilter will block my comment or at least goes into moderation list).

BTW, I was solicited by a local vendor to develop something similar (music content recommendation engine) here for their online mall (ie, online supermarket) which they also sell music online, but after I submitted my proposal to the management team, the decided not to pursue such content recommendation engine preferring to just use collaborative filtering technology instead.

Anyway, your developers might be interested in the list of peer review publications from Music Technology Group’s (MTG), which covers the various algorithms/details for music content retrieval/recommendation technology. BMat spun off from MTG.

While audio-based recommendations have some advantages i personally think that recommendations based on collaborative filtering as used by iTunes or Amazon are at this point better suitable for most consumers. Since they replicate the mainstream, users often perceive those recommendations to be more “relevant” than those produced by audio-based methods.

I don’t think the point is that their recommendation software is better, it is that you are more likely to try out a band you haven’t heard when it is free or cheap ($.05 or $.10). If it gets popular, it raises in price, and that is suppose to be a sign of its quality (as is the recommendations). If you buy/recommend a song that becomes popular, you also give you to try and find more new music.

Whether or not it works is another story (popularity isn’t the best indicator for quality).

Indie Artist

From a consumer standpoint, I like that Amie Street doesn’t have another download client (unlike amazon and emusic, it simply zips the files). I also like that when you purchase something from them, you can stream the whole song/album straight off the site, so you don’t need to download it again if you are at work or a friends house.

I don’t know how good it is for musicians, but in this day and age I would think a musician would want to be on as many outlets as possible.

Faisal Khan

Songs cap out at $.98 (cheaper than iTunes), and I am not sure about album prices, but i think they cap out at $8.98 or $9.98 with some exceptions (double albums, etc).

Learn from iTunes is what I say…

1) Amie Street’s pricing model is detrimental to independent musicians. And their effort to spin it otherwise is totally disingenuous. Like Falafulu Fisi said (in the above comment), Amie Street doesn’t have a good recommendation engine, so it doesn’t serve as a way to “discover” new music.

So that means it’s just another destination location to purchase music you’ve already discovered . . . and one whose only selling point is that they can deliver a whole album to you for pennies. They claim that by lowering the barrier to entry, that instead of selling hundreds of downloads, an artist will now sell hundred of thousands. But that’s not how it works for indies. There will never be enough people who know about our music for us to sell that kind of volume.

But Amie Street is counting on hundreds of thousands of artists making very little. The long tail is very very long. They’ll get theirs cumulatively.

I was very underwhelmed with the discussions I had with their upper management in email exchanges about my concerns for what their business model might mean to indies.

2) And The Orchard . . . well, that’s a whole different story. I think The Orchard is just plain corrupt. They filed bankruptcy a few years back, and as part of their settlement, they decided to sell off their warehouse full of consigned inventory (at the time, they were the independent branch of Valley Media, and they were positioning themselves to be THE major distributer of independent releases . . . back before CD Baby had figured out how to manage the logistics of the long tail).

So thousands of independent artists had their consigned inventory in The Orchard’s warehouse sold out from under them. Basically, the Orchard sold products that didn’t belong to them (they hadn’t paid the artists yet for these albums) for pennies on the dollar to pay off their debts. And never gave those artists any of that money. It happened to me. It happened to several of my friends.

So I don’t care how pretty the Orchard’s new business model might be, these days . . . folks like that can’t succeed in a world where “indie-cred” reigns supreme.

I don’t know if Tech Crunch has done any pieces about CD Baby. I’ve only been following the blog for a few months. But that’s one company that has the genuine interest of independent musicians at heart. And makes extraordinary efforts to consult with the musical community to better serve our needs.

Anyway . . . sorry that was so long. My two cents is more like a nickel on this subject.

– Michael Arrington