This will be the third annual post on “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without.” The first post, for 2006, is here. The 2007 post, written a year ago, is here.

This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Google Docs, etc.), some are for fun (Amazon Music, Amie Street, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.

The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Five products have been favorites all three years (Flickr, Netvibes, TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress). Five more were favorites last year and this year, but not in 2006 (1-800-Free-411, Amie Street, Digg, Gmail, YouTube). Two were off the list last year but are back now (Delicious, Technorati). And there are seven new products on the list (Amazon MP3 Store, Facebook, Firefox, Google Reader, TripIt, Twitter, Zoho). Some of my picks might be surprising, like Firefox just being added to the list this year (I used Flock previously and was unhappy with Firefox on the Mac, but the 3.0 beta is performing very well). Some of these are close calls (I love Pageflakes, but just not enough to fully switch from Netvibes, for example). And there are a bunch of startups that didn’t make the list to keep it short. I’ve put a few “almosts” at the end to round out the list, as well as a couple of favorite gadgets.

Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

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The signs are everywhere that a revolution is taking place in music. DRM is history, the price of music is falling towards zero (and sometimes even free isn’t enough to slow piracy), and even big music sites like Yahoo are beginning to break ranks with the RIAA and labels.

But Amazon may be doing more than anyone else to change the way music is discovered, promoted and sold. Not only do they have a music store that only sells DRM-free music, but they are experimenting with startups who are trying to break the stranglehold that labels have on discovering, promoting and marketing new artists. These startups are giving artists a different path to find their fans. And Amazon is helping them.

Today Amazon announced that it is partnering with a European startup called SellABand and will sell music from SellABand artists. We first covered SellABand in August 2006 – unknown artists upload music to the site and ask fans to chip in $10 if they like what they hear. Once the band gets to $50,000 they’ve proven themselves, and they get to record a CD in a professional studio. Each fan gets a limited edition CD. If the artist doesn’t reach $50,000, the fans can get their money back or give it to another artist.

Earlier this year we noted that the model seems to work. Today, more than 6,000 artists have uploaded music to the site, and a lucky few have been picked by fans to record albums. The top artists will now have their music sold on Amazon UK as well, making the model even more attractive.

See our coverage of Strayform, a different startup with a variation on the SellABand business model.

Amazon also invested in a different startup in the music space – Amie Street. Amie Street is a company I have long admired – we first covered it in July 2006, and last year I added it to my list of “web 2.0 companies I couldn’t live without.”

Amie Street has a model for selling non-DRM music that simultaneously earns artists money and ranks artists by popularity of downloads. All songs start at free. As users begin to download a song, the price rises steadily until it reaches $0.99. So the more a song costs, the more popular it is. Most of the muck is filtered out by $0.25 or so, and the site has some really excellent music. Even some well known artists have tried it out.

Amie street says that the average first time purchase on the site is close to $10. Members spend an average of nearly 8 minutes on the site each visit, listening to some of the 850,000 songs available for download. They also recently inked a deal with CDBaby, where those artists can get their music ranked on Amie Street. And they just opened a Japanese version of the site that is selling anime as well as music.

OurStage, a Boston based startup we recently covered, has yet another way of ranking indie bands.

What’s similar about SellABand and Amie Street is that both startups remove the need for a label to “discover” new artists and promote them in the hope that they sell CDs. Instead, the crowd is deciding what they like and showing it by donating to the artist (SellABand) or downloading songs (Amie Street). If either succeeds, they’ll have Amazon at least partially to thank.

Mzinga isn’t the only new product launching tonight at the Boston TechCrunch Party. Massachusetts based OurStage is debuting a new iPhone site where anyone can listen to top ranked Indie songs as well.

Ourstage, which launched in March 2007, is a site that lets users rank and buy Indie songs. Artists upload the songs, which users then judge – two song snippets are heard and the user votes for which one he or she likes the best. The result is are constantly updated top lists of songs. The top songs overall or by category are then listed on the site, and two $5,000 prizes are given to the top artists each month.

Users can also purchase any song in unrestricted MP3 format for $.99. Currently the artists receive 100% of proceeds, but starting in 2008 OurStage will begin to take a 30% cut.

Now iPhone users can visit the site and stream any of the top songs – just visit ourstage.com from your iPhone to access the custom user interface, which uses Quicktime to stream the music.

OurStage is taking a different approach to ranking Indie music from other startups we’ve covered. Amie Street, by comparison, simply sets the price of every news song at zero and then begins raising the price as the number of downloads increases. Amie Street was recently funded by Amazon. Also see our coverage of Strayform and SellaBand.

Strayform is a Texas startup that, like SellaBand and the recently funded Amie Street, is giving unsigned artists a way to promote and sell their music.

Like SellaBand, artists sign up, upload some of their music and then create proposals for new music they want to create. Fans can listen to and download the music (DRM free), and donate directly to proposals they like. The proposals are all different. One artist, for example, says he will mention the name of person who pledges the most in the song itself.

The service is more like SellaBand than Amie Street. SellaBand also lets artists upload music and takes donations. If donations get to $50k, as they have for several artists already, The artist gets a contract with a label. Amie Street, by contrast, simply lets artists sell their music on the site. Downloads starts at free and the price increases steadily as more downloads occur.

Strayform has had little press, but, inexplicably were covered by Fox News in a 3 minute segment. The video is available on their home page. I like the service, but the site sure could use a redesign.

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.

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.

I’ve been writing about the Amie Street music site since their launch last July. Their model has the potential to disrupt the music industry from the bottom up: Bands and labels upload music, which is downloadable in DRM-free MP3 format. The price always starts at free, and as more people download the song, the price starts to rise, eventually hitting $.98. Higher priced songs are by definition more popular, and I’ve found that anything over $.50 or so is pretty good music. 70% of proceeds go to the band/label, and Amie Street keeps the rest.

The service is now starting to make real progress with labels, too. They’ve signed a deal with Nettwerk Music Group, which will be uploading their entire library to Amie Street over the next few months. The first music to go up on the site is the new Barenaked Ladies album, Barenaked Ladies Are Men. All sixteen songs from the album are available here.

The songs will only be free through the first few downloads, and will start to rise after that. But even at full price, listeners are getting quality music, DRM-free. Let’s hope other labels follow Nettwerk shortly. Market driven prices and no DRM = Music Nirvana.

Amie Street is one of my favorite startups right now, partially because they are the embodiment of (what I consider to be) the perfect music model: DRM-free MP3s sold at pure market driven prices.

The company’s business model is dead simple – Artists can 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.

We’ve followed the company through its beta and launch periods. Until now, though, the company wasn’t doing much with all the pricing/popularity data they were gathering. Yesterday, however, they started allowing people to vote on songs directly (like Digg and the recently launched iJigg), and launched new areas of the site to show popular songs.

Amie Street has also released tools to help artists promote their songs, including an embeddable player for any song (see this MySpace page for an example) and a tool to allow artists to create Amie Street song stores on their own websites.

The company says they are currently in the process of raising a Series A round of capital. In this funding environment, I don’t think it will be very hard for them to close that round. All three of the founders, Elliott Breece, Elias Roman and Joshua Boltuch (pictured here) are still, I believe, in college.

iJigg is a new, easy-on-the-eyes music site that launched a couple of days ago – we first saw it on the TechCrunch Forums.

Think Digg for music, plus lots of Flash functionality. Songs are presented on the home page and can be “jigged” by members. Songs can also be embedded into web pages (I’ve done so with one of the popular songs below), commented on, etc. Songs are tagged for easy browsing, and there are most popular and recently posted areas as well.

As a music discovery service, it’s compelling. And the Digg way of having massive numbers of people vote on stuff to make the cream rise is a good way to sort stuff. Others are giving glowing reviews.

Another problem with iJigg is that they don’t provide any way to get your hands on the music. No downloads, and no links to buy the music. You can listen to it all day on the Flash player, and embed it on other sites, but you aren’t getting this on your iPod.

All this may limit adoption, and any friction could be fatal when ultimately these new indie-music startups are competing with MySpace Music, which has 7 million band profiles. In December 2006, MySpace music had 16.2 million unique visitors and 475 million page views. It will be hard to pull eyeballs away from MySpace.

And at the end of the day, I still like the Amie Street (our coverage here) model best for indie music. People can download songs without DRM. Songs start out free, and as more downloads occur the price starts to edge up. If a song gets above $0.50, its really popular. Anyone trying to game the system will be paying money to do so, which cuts down on fraud significantly. In my opinion, it’s a much purer voting system than the one iJigg has launched. And you can put the music on your iPod. I wouldn’t be surprised to see eMusic, the popular DRM-free music download site, adopt an Amie Street music model down the road. And perhaps others will too.

A year ago I wrote a post called “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without” and listed thirteen startups whose products made a real impact in my life. Those were the products that I loved, and used every day. I enjoyed sorting through the hundreds of startups that we had written about, and picking just a handful that made a real impact on my life. It was so much fun, actually, that I’m updating the list this year.

Seven of the companies are still on the list. Six have dropped off to make room for new products, and I’ve added two more to round out the list to fifteen total products. Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

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DRM-free music marketplace Amie Street is announcing its beta launch this morning. (Note: it looks like it’s having traffic issues today, but it is coming up if you’re patient.) We wrote about the company’s alpha launch and interesting demand-driven pricing model here in July. Songs uploaded by artists fluctuate in price according to demand over time. Users get recommendation tokens for each dollar they put into the system and get free credits if the songs they recommend rise in price. Artists receive 70% of sales proceeds. The company is angel funded, with one of the most notable angels being Robin Richards of MP3.com fame.

Today marks Amie Street’s official public launch as well as a site redesign. The design is still a bit rough, but some new features have been added and there is better Mac support for the interface. The new site allows advanced searching, a pop-up music player allowing users to listen to playlists of sample tracks, and Meebome accounts for real-time-chat in artist stores. Since we covered the company in July, their user base has increased to around 4,000 users. They have had a couple hundred artists participating in the alpha selling around 2,100 songs.

The band State Radio from Nettwerk, the label that publishes Sarah McLachlan, is selling music on the site. Most of the music is from independent bands but with prices as low as 2 to 10 cents for many songs and long samples available to listen to – even the very risk averse can do some looking around for music they like on the site. To be honest, I’m still looking – but I love the model. The most successful songs on the service have been by high school groups who manage to leverage their real-world connections to drive sales online. One such group, Spinlight City from Miami, has the most expensive track right now at 70 cents. Tracks top out at $0.98.

Amie Street isn’t the only company experimenting with freedom from DRM and changing price structures. See also the crowdsourced music production of Sellaband, the free listening with heavy DRM of SpiralFrog, the 77 cent tracks with DRM and 88 cent versions without from PayPlay.fm and the feature rich (plus newly funded) music browser Songbird. Music distribution is something that obviously needs some serious reworking. DRM faces growing criticism, music prices are too high and the ease of online distribution is making it clear that major labels (instead of the artists) are taking too much of the money we spend on music. I’m glad to see the release of Amie Street into public beta and hope this or some other innovative model like it finds traction with users.

A lot has happened in the music space recently that suggests a steady progression towards the sale of DRM-free music by the big labels. In my opinion this progression/evolution is inevitable, and will be followed by a reduction in pricing towards zero – services will be able to sell based on service levels (ease and speed of download, inclusion of music video content and album art, etc.), but not much else. I’ll expand these thoughts in a post later this week.

Today I came across a new startup called Amie Street that may have found the right way to help people discover and market price music from new or little known bands. The founders, Elliott Breece, Elias Roman and Joshua Boltuch, are three Providence, RI college students (pictured left to right in photo below).

This is a very alpha site and there are a few bugs (I can only get the flash player to work on Firefox on a PC, no luck with IE or Firefox on Mac), and the interface could use some help with flow. But the core business model is killer, something I haven’t seen before.

Artists can upload their music to Amie Street for promotion and sale. Users form social networks with friends, listen to, and purchase music. All songs are DRM-free in MP3. Songs appear to be at 192kpbs quality level, although it may just be whatever the artist uploads.

All songs are free to start. Prices fluctuate over time based on demand for the song – currently the highest priced song, “Against the Wall” by Danny Ross, is $0.36. 273 songs have been uploaded so far. This demand based pricing model seems like a good way to sell music.

Users can search, browse and listen to music for free (via streaming). My download test worked well and the price of the song was properly deducted from the $3 in account credit I put on my credit card.

Users who have purchased a song can recommend it to their friends using a limited number of “rec’s” that they receive (users get one per dollar they add to their account). Once recommended, users will get account credit if the price of the song increases, giving them an incentive to find and recommend good music.

If you REC a song at 1 cent or above Amie Street will pay you half of the difference in the prices. So, if you REC a song at 10 cents, and it ends up at 90 cents, we will pay you 40 cents (half of the 80 cents difference).

If you REC a song while it is still free (0 cents), and it ends up at 98 cents, we will deposit 98 cents into your Amie Account. Amie Street pays you more for RECing a song while it is still free because you take more of a risk and because we want everyone on Amie Street to be RECing those great undiscovered songs.

Artists keep 70% of proceeds after $5 in sales. They are not required to sell their music exclusively through Amie Street, and can remove it at any time.

The model is extremely well thought out. Since the vast majority of bands are not concerned with people stealing their music – they just want people to listen to it – Amie Street could be a great way for them to promote their stuff. Myspace has proven that social networks are a perfect mechanism for promoting music, and the tweaks Amie Street have put on the model could be a winner. This is one to keep an eye on as it prepares for a full public launch.