Amie Street always made sense to me. The idea is to show demand for music via variable pricing. Songs start off free and move up in price (up to 98 cents) as more people buy them. I first wrote about them in 2006 when the founders were still living in a dorm at Brown University. In 2007 Amazon invested in the company.
Big labels have mostly shied away from Amie Street, although they’ve had success with independent labels, and there are more than 1.5 millions songs on the site. Today, though, the company is announcing their first deal with a major label, Sony.
New and catalog songs will be available at set prices of $.69, $.99 and $1.29 per song. That isn’t Amie Street’s normal model, but at least it shows that Sony is willing to experiment with variable pricing. Perhaps in time they’ll be willing to move to a purer model.
Some of the more popular Sony artists are listed here.
A great model the rest of the music industry would adopt overnight – if it cared as a whole about it’s future viability at all.
I don’t know if I agree. Amie Street works best with new artists and songs, where people don’t know if they’ll like it or not. The price rises as people buy it and it’s a signal that the music is “good.” It works really well for new stuff. But long-known catalog music, or anything that’s popular already via a well known artist, is going to hit the maximum price immediately. anyhow, something to think about there.
Hey Mike, new and under-discovered music is definitely a sweet spot for Amie Street. Per Ben’s comment though, the vast majority of the music industry, by volume, is just that: new or under-discovered music and would benefit from a model that made it easier/more fun/less risky to experiment with that kind of music.
Hey Mike,
A few years ago, Amie Street was all about the variable pricing model – it conveyed useful information. But, over time I’ve found that pricing information has become relatively less important. Now, its the community of passionate music listeners who find real gems that matters to me. Because of them, I trust Amie Street more than any music rec service.
If the ASM crew can apply that magic to the Sony catalog then this will be yet another reason to come back to this awesome site. Good luck guys…
AmieStreet have a great model, but the point here is that Sony isnt adopting their model at all!
I agree with mike the unique appeal to amie st, or there differentiator would be how their pricing increases with popularity of the music and artist. It doesn’t hurt their model by including major artists, but I don’t think it helps them in any way, now this service is just another alternative to iTunes or amazon store.
Let’s tighten up this news a bit. This Amie Street play is with RED Distribution, a (anyone can get a deal) subsidiary of Sony Music.
Alby Galuten and the other goons in that digital department are too arrogant to use Amie for their full catalogue.
Alby, by the way, stay away from CMX, talk to David to find out why.
It’s the full catalog, but only RED is currently priced dynamically, I believe:
http://news.cne...0358136-93.html
Big labels aren’t going away anytime soon are they? sigh…
nothing new here. those price points are not variable and are available elsewhere for this content. they are set by sony for different types of catalog. do your homework next time techmunch.
Nice information.
Great model for selling a commodity product. Creates a large desire for the product up front. There would have to be a point were the price would stop rising, otherwise sales would completely drop off at the high end.
Musicians/labels should concentrate on selling Albums NOT tracks… each Album should retail for $5 while tracks to should be at 99 cents to encourage the purchase of full Albums.. and who knows, maybe musicians will feel encouraged to compose incredible music once again 10+ songs at a time!~
Norm
Beyond.FM
Albums are dead. Mainly because on most albums there are 10 out of 12 tracks that are just crap fillers. Artists dont make proper albums these days in which all tracks are of high quality. Thats why album sales are going down the toilet.
I really like the idea behind this website. BUT, I think they are well on the verge of selling their soul(s) to “The Man.” I Hope it’s not too late for a full refund.
AmieStreet has a good model plus they have a great community around the service. Sony have joined the service and want the community, but they dont care about the innovation and fan-driven pricing, cause they have just adopted a fixed pricing model.
Is Sony worried about using the fan-driven pricing because they know most of their tracks wont increase to a decent price point?
We also wrote about this over at: http://routenot...-pricing-model/