Amie Street, the music store that sells songs on a sliding price scale based on how popular they are, has launched a totally revamped website and new features including a new music player and an enhanced recommendation system. We’ve been big fans since first hearing about them in 2006.
Despite Amie Street’s growing popularity, especially in the indie music scene, the site has long had a somewhat barebones or even amateurish look that was functional but not very visually appealing. The new site is much more professional, with a rotating ‘featured’ panel prominently displaying new releases and promotions, and more intuitive overall design.
New features for the release include a new music library/player that looks very similar to iTunes. Users can access all music that they’ve purchased through Amie Street and stream it from this player free of charge, from any computer. Users can also browse through the music libraries of their peers, though they’ll only be able to listen to brief previews of songs they don’t own (the company hopes to eventually include full song previews, but it sounds like this is still a ways off).
The site is also expanding its role as a discovery platform, strategically placing recommendations throughout the site. Other enhancements to the site include the addition of wishlist and gifting functionality to the main store.
Co-founder Joshua Boltuch says that site continues to see steady growth, with over 1 million songs available and an increase in paying users of around 18% month over month for the past three months. The new, more professional design can only help this – I expect many of the people who may have been turned off by the site’s former ‘indie’ look will be more receptive to the new version.
Congrats to Amie Street, it’s good to see more and more options for musicians to distribute their music on the Internet that aren’t contained to iTunes. Whether or not there will ever be a second fiddle to iTunes is another issue all-together.
I think we’ll see a lot more startups receiving Series B rounds from their previous investors as money gets tighter and VCs need to look to bolster their current investments to guarantee their success.
Awesome guys!
I like the redesign. I like the service.
But what I really want to know is what their revenue is!
I am wildly curious to hear what their numbers are…
There’s just one problem that I can see. The top recommended song of all time is “Get Low Wit It (feat. Akon)” by Romeo.
Now that was funny adamvee. I like the sliding scale idea alot.
Check this out if Akon ain’t your bag:
http://tobroket...category/music/
well being an amiestreet artist i have to say they really screwed us…for instance if you try to find who the #5 artist on the site according to sales and recs…you can not on the new system…it is me by the way…they had a really cool system to get heard and get a real barometer for your popularity that was honest and helped you make a lil money…it truly was for the lil guy artists with cult followings such as myself…the redesign totally pushed anyone who was making any real progress back into obscurity…and IT SUCKS!…i worked very hard at developing a promo engine that amiestreet was integral too and i along with a lot of other small timers made them a lot of money and they saved it up and turned on us…amiestreet is now just a corporate monster of overproduced marketed crap…i will soon be removing all of my music from their site…please do NOT BUY ANY MUSIC FROM AMIESTREET at least not mine…instead go to http://www.jimmyvalentine.biz and all my cd,s are available special requests of custom burnt cd’s will be taken at http://www.mysp...autifullmonster
AMIESTREET SUCKS !!
THANKS I LOVE YOU WHOEVER YOU ARE!
JIMMY VALENTINE