Online music startup Amie Street has raised $3.9 million in Series B funding led by Deep Fork Capital, which included the conversion of a bridge note issued previously by the investment firm. Three undisclosed investors also participated in the round. Amie Street raised an undisclosed amount of series A funding in 2007 from Amazon.

Amie Street’s co-founder and CEO Joshua Boltuch tells us that the funds will be used towards new product development but remained mum about the nature of what the startup will be developing. Amie Street, which allows allows artists to upload their music for promotion and sale, recently announced several music licensing agreements, including a deal with Sony Music. The startup has also seen success with independent labels. To date, the site has over 1.5 million songs available for download.

The startup is built on a variable pricing model, where songs start off free and move up in price (up to 98 cents) as more people buy them. Last fall, Amie Street acquired music search engine and online jukebox Songza for part stock, part cash, with the total sum in the high six figures to low seven figures.

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Music plays a large role in our lives. Since the web now plays an even bigger part, combining the two together has become unavoidable. The greatest thing about this powerful duo is that you don’t need to spend a lot of time searching for music you like  — just use this nifty guide list and you’ll find just about everything you need to enjoy hours of good music. The sound quality changes from service to service, but overall, it’s good enough for regular web usage.

Please note that this is a list of services that you can use over the net without the need to download anything to your computer. This is why I’m not listing any P2P software: i.e., Spotify, as well the fact that most of us can’t really test it or use it for all that matter. This is also only the first half of this guide; part two will include more web music players (including MySpace Music, Streamzy, and others) as well as music search engines and services that make it easy to share songs on Twitter and other social sites.

Music Recommendations:

Pandora is a service that can be used only in a specific locale, this one being within the U.S. Luckily, I had the chance to test the service when it was first released and became available to everyone. Launched way back in July 2005, the project had been in the initial testing phases for five years prior to launch date. Pandora recommends music to you by matching similar musical attributes. All you really need to do is choose an artist or a band you like, and Pandora will do the rest. Pandora delivers high quality 128Kbps audio streams, offering recommendations similar to the artists you have chosen. Pandora’s player looks like a radio, you can open up to 100 stations and navigate through them quickly. Registering for Pandora will provide you with a free account (advertising-supported). Free Pandora accounts will play up to  40 hours of music for free per month, you also have the option to pay 99 cents for unlimited listening hours for the rest of that month, or pay $36 to upgrade Pandora for one year. If you want to download music from Pandora, you can do it through iTunes or Amazon. You can see our past Pandora coverage here.

With almost 3 million unique visitors a day, Last.fm is one of the most powerful social music communities on the Web today. Like Pandora, the service allows you to enjoy music that you like, but unlike Pandora, Last.fm analyses what you and your friends listen to and like, and then suggests more music based on that analysis. When you recommend music to a friend or you tag it, or you write about it, or simply just listen to it – you shift the song’s importance on the site, and will in turn get recommended to more people. Based on the music you’ve already listened to, Last.fm will recommend new music you might like, as well as suggest other users with a similar music taste to yours, which you might be interested in friending, and you can also easily communicate with them. If you live outside the U.S., U.K. or Germany, you can listen with a free 30-track trial or subscribe for a low price of $3/month for unlimited radio streaming. (Launched in 2002!)

This is how BlogMusik, looked in 2006, and this is how Deezer (formerly BlogMusik) looks today – pretty impressive change, don’t you think? The French-based service is one of the largest and happens to also be a very successful music recommendation search engine. Once registered here, you can create your personal profile and reach the Deezer community. You can create playlists, send messages to your contacts, leave comments, add artists and albums to your favorites, and more. But here’s what I like the most – The SmartRadio, which is an intelligent radio that automatically generates 3 hours(!) of continuous listening based on one artist – completely free. Priceless! You can see our past coverage of Deezer here.

I think the first Adobe AIR application that I ever tried was Finetune. Finetune provides you with the most interesting new playlists of related music from your choice of artists. Besides the site’s community where you can browse, listen to music, create a profile, connect with other users and more, Finefune also has some cool feautures to complete their suite, and each tool gives you an extraordinary music experience. Take for example the Finetune Wii project (which can be played also over the web), it’s a great sight and sound for the eyes and ears. Just enter an artist’s name and Finetune will create a playlist with similar music that will play for hours. Best of all it’s free, and you also get an iPhone, Facebook and a Desktop app that all sync with your music playlist, no matter where you play it from. You can see our past coverage of FineTune here.

Also worth mentioning in this same topic group are, of course: Ilike.com (acquired by Myspace), and music.strands.tv

Independent Music:

Amie Street is a home for musicians. The service allows music fans to discover new and independent music. Visitors at the site can search for new music based on genre, region, or recommendations. Fans can also search for music according to its price -  Amie Street is actually the only marketplace where listeners determine the price of the music. How does it work? Every song is originally priced free or very inexpensive and increases in price, up to 98 cents, as more and more users purchase it. Musicians then get 70% of the revenue from each sale. Additionally, Amie Street matches you with music that you might like, for example: I couldn’t locate Coldplay on the site, but I got more than 70 results that sound similar to the band. Obviously, this exposes me to music that I’ve never heard before, which is always a welcomed experience. You can see our past coverage of Amie Street here.

Why is Jamendo one of my favorite music services? It offers the largest catalog of music under Creative Commons licenses – worldwide. And, not only are all of the albums free to download, there’s also a large chance you won’t know any of the artists. If you already have an open mind about music, surely it won’t stop you from listening to some new albums, right? The best way to find music at this site is to search by the genre tags. Found something that you like? You can review, comment, rate, share and as I’ve said download it for free.  The service is available in seven languages, and has an iPhone app that you can download for free. Business model? Yes they have one too.

SoundCloud is by far the best looking music application there is today. It offers a great interface, a great user-experience and above these all, great music! SoundCloud lets music professionals receive, send and distribute their music. The service allows professionals (and non-professionals) to exchange, and follow music and musicians at the site. It’s a full community where people can easily communicate with each other based on shared tastes, but it is also a place where musicians can store and showcase their music using high quality standards. With the free account, you can only upload 5 tracks maximum per month, but if you are an industry fanatic and you find this plan to be somewhat lacking, you can check the pro page for packages that are more suitable to your needs. See our past coverage here.

TheSixtyOne allows artists to upload their songs and lets thousands of listeners decide whether they like it or not. The most popular songs hit the front page. Think about it as a Digg for music, the more people heart a song, the higher it goes. The site connects musicians and fans, giving them all the tools to communicate with each other. For artists, it’s good place to promote their work. For anyone else, it’s a wonderful place to discover and support new music.

Create & Listen to Playlist:

I’ve never been very much of a Project Playlist fan, but I have to say it’s a good service. Ultimately, it’s a community based on playlists. You don’t have to register to be able to listen to the music, but once you do, you can start building your playlist and enjoy more features such as the Playlist IM, which is a chat system similar to Facebook where you can connect your ‘playlist’ friends or even friends from AIM, Facebook, Yahoo Messenger, etc. What else? You can write blog entries, upload photos, privately connect with other members, browse thousands of other music playlists, comment, share, and much more. My guess is that people use this site mostly to share their playlist on their blog/site or social network. Playlist allows you to grab a playlist code and embed it anywhere you want. One thing that bugs me though is that the member’s search feature is missing. Today, when everything is so connected to your identity, this is a must have feature. On the other hand, I was impressed to see they saved my playlist from 2006…

Jiwa.fm allows you to create personalize playlist and share it in the Jiwa.fm community or with friends & family. As a member, you are able to share, exchange, and explore music. You can also expand your tastes with the SmartRadio tool. I found this service to be unique in a way because no matter what you are doing at the site, it won’t prevent you from listening to your playlist, it just plays in the background. Amazingly, when you click on an artist from within a mixed artists playlist, it will automatically create an album playlist of that artist. You might find the site to be a bit cluttered at first time, but once you get it, it works like a charm – highly recommended.

At Jogli, you don’t really need to create a playlist – they create it for you. Think about it as a giant web-based CD store where you can search for an artist, see all of his/her albums, and then listen to them exactly as listed in original CD  Let’s take Michael Jackson for example: Here you can find all his discography, and listen to his CDs one by one. Clicking on the button ‘Play Radio’ will open a radio station generated from music you might like from similar artists. As a registered member, you are able to save playlists, write reviews, and more. You can also import your playlists to Last.fm or iTunes to make it a video playlist. Check out our past coverage of Jogli here.

MixTube would have been better and easier if they allowed you to search for Youtube videos on their site to create a playlist. But no, you have to supply them with a Youtube URL, which means, you’ll have to go directly to Youtube, search for a song, then copy-paste that song URL back into MixTube. Thus, I found it to be frustrating. But looking at the bright side, you can always search for someone else’s playlist, and save yourself time and agony. One word about the Youtube music integration – lots of services use it, but unfortunately, it doesn’t offer you much control of your playlist, and what plays today, may not play tomorrow..

Lala is another great music store/playlist maker that we’ve covered extensively since the site relaunched last year. It allows users to listen to any song they want one time. If you want to listen to a song more than that, you buy a 10 cent ‘web song’ that lets you stream the song from the cloud as many times as you want (you can also purchase a full download of the song as you would from iTunes or Amazon). The site has a great integrated music player and a variety of pre-made playlists built by other users.

Worth mentioning: Imeem, and Maestro.fm

Music Visualization:

There’s no doubt in my mind that Musicovery has a strong following of avid users. The site is an interactive and personalized webradio enabling its users to generate in a few clicks a musical program adapted to the various listening situations and their preferences. Their unique mood matrix proposes a relationship between music and mood in an ergonomic and attractive manner. I’ve submitted this item about the service to Digg in 2006 and it’s good to see the site still works . But things have changed. You have limited navigation if you’re not a pro user ($15/3 months or $48/12 months), but once you are – the sky is the limit. In any case, this service will blow you away.

CitySounds.fm is perhaps just a mashup site, but it’s a good one! CitySounds.fm collects music from SoundCloud and pictures from Flickr to create a wonderful music experience from a single page. You can listen to the latest music from cities all around the world. At the top are the most active cities and the list is constantly changing as new music is being created.

Web-Radio:

Very similar to Last.fm in concept, Jango allows you to create your own custom radio stations and share them with friends. Just type in what you want to hear – and your station will immediately play the music you want along with similar favorites of other Jango users who share your tastes. You can customize your stations further by adding more artists and rating songs. Each artist get a page, containing the web-radio, the music playlist, biographies, events list, comments from members at the site, and fan list for easy communication. The service claims to be legal and says it pays royalties due to all labels/artists every time a song is played. Moreover, Jango runs a program called Jango Airplay. This program gives emerging artists an unprecedented opportunity to be proactively exposed to the millions of visitors at the site. See our past coverage of Jango here.

RadioBeta is an efficient way to locate radio stations in your area or around the globe. You can search stations by geography, genre, band, language or tags. You can listen without signing up, or you can log in and create your personal dashboard with favorite stations that  you can then listen to on a daily basis. We mostly hear radio on the go, but now you can easily track your favorite radio stations on the web. All the radio stations are public so you aren’t asked to pay anything to use the site.

OK, TheRadio is also one of my favorites because of its simplicity. Entering an artist or a genre gets you custom channel, but if you go over the channel listing, you will find much more interesting suggestions. I don’t know about you but I actually like when someone else picks the music as long is it in the range of my request. Anyway, TheRadio does a great job on finding music that I like – it simply works.

Aupeo fits in the Recommendation list as well as this category. The service lets you experience music in a fours different ways: by Stations, Artist, Mood, and Personal. The Stations area is pretty limited if you don’t have a pro account, but you can still get the feel of it. In the Artist zone, you enter your favorite name and choose from a variety stations suggested. The coolest way is the Mode area, which plays music based on your chosen mode. These stations are created by music experts, says Aupeo.  The Personal station streams music based on your music behavior at the site. Overall, very intensive and powerful!

Worth mentioning: Tun3r, Mugasha, and  Play.fm

That’s it for Part 1 of this music guide. If you have any other suggestions related to these groups, you are more than welcome to add them in the comments. In the next part of this post, I’ll offer the best options for Music search engines, Music web-players, Twitter-Music craziness, and more. Stay tuned!

Image by RossinaBossioB on Flickr.

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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:

800-Free-411

800-Free-411 was first added to the list last year. Use it to make free directory assistance calls and avoid per call charges of up to $3.50 that cell phone carriers charge. They have taken more than 6% of the market for directory service calls in the U.S. over the last two years. Google, Microsoft, AT&T and others have entered the market, but Jingle Networks, the company offering the product, has a patent on the idea of pairing advertising with free directory service. Here’s a tip: add “FREE411USA” as a Skype contact and do lookups that way, too.

Amazon MP3 Store

Amazon’s new music store is just about perfect. With the addition of Warner Music they’ve got 3 million DRM-free songs at prices lower than Apple’s iTunes store (which has only 2 million DRM-free songs). It’s not as cheap as AllOfMP3 was, but at least it’s guilt-free and legal. Plus, it will hopefully drive Apple to improve iTunes (offering no-DRM only search would be a good start).

Amie Street

I have been a huge fan of Amie Street since it launched in mid 2006. They sell songs from unknown artists at variable prices. Every song starts at free, and as more downloads occur the price rises, up to a cap of $.99. Amazon likes the model, too. They invested in Amie Street in August.

Delicious

Delicious was on my list in 2006, but last year I switched to Blue Dot for bookmarking and tagging web pages because it had a semi-private feature that allowed sharing just with friends. This year I’m back with Delicious. They finally got Firefox integration just right, and the new user interface, previewed in September, is a big improvement.

Digg

Digg. Sometimes I love it, sometimes I hate it. But it’s an important source of traffic for us, and a great place to find interesting stories. I added it to the list last year, and it stay’s for another year. Competitor Reddit is another favorite source of news, though, and newcomer Mixx is coming on strong too.

Facebook

Just over a year ago I joined Facebook, and it is now a part of my daily routine to check up on what friends are up to, test a couple of new Facebook applications, and just generally be a part of the community. A year ago they were a hot startup, but I don’t think anyone could have predicted just how much they were to grow (in size and mindshare) in 2007. They constantly push the boundaries – and no one can say they’re boring. Facebook is the only pure social network I actually use regularly.

Firefox

The Firefox browser is being added to my list for 2008. If it seems like I’m a little late to the party, realize that Firefox on a Mac was essentially unusable until Firefox 3 came out (still in beta). Until recently Flock was my Browser of choice. Now, it’s Firefox.

Flickr

Flickr has been on the list all three years. It’s still the place I put all of my photos online. Someday perhaps Facebook could become the repository for my pictures. But since all my photos are already at Flickr, inertia keeps me there. Hopefully someday the two services will talk to each other more effectively. There should just be one place in the cloud for photos, and all my social networks should access them there.

Gmail

At the end of 2006 I already thought Gmail was close to perfect. This year they added IMAP support, which was the final piece of the puzzle. I still don’t like the way Gmail groups email threads, and tagging could be improved. But it’s an excellent service and just barely edges out Yahoo Mail as my favorite mail application.

Google Reader

Two years ago I was using Bloglines to read feeds. Last year I switched to NetNewsWire. But Google Reader is just too good to ignore any longer. It’s quite simply the most elegant and useful feed reader available today. The product actually first launched in October 2005 but had serious flaws. But it got steadily better over time. Recent privacy hiccups aside, Google Reader is a beautiful web application and an amazing way to digest tons of information effectively.

Netvibes

Netvibes, Pageflakes, iGoogle and My Yahoo are all excellent ways to organize lots of important data sources into a single home page. I’ve been using Netvibes since 2005 and I’ve stuck with it out of inertia more than anything else. Any of these products are perfect for your home page. If you aren’t using one yet, try them out. My Yahoo doesn’t work with Firefox 3 for some reason, though. Hopefully they’ll fix that asap.

Skype

Skype Skype has been on my list for three years running, and I expect it will stay there for the near future. It’s the most important productivity tool that I have – I’d give up email before I gave up Skype. It would be very nice if they opened up the API and allowed other applications to use the back end Skype service for IM and calls without opening up the Skype client though. MySpace seems to be the first to crack the nut. Hopefully others will follow, or else Gizmo will someday take their spot.

Techmeme

TechMeme is another three-year favorite. It is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. I probably generate more daily page views at TechMeme than any other website. It’s amazing that this is still a one man (Gabe Rivera), bootstrapped startup.

Technorati

Technorati was on my list in 2006, and off last year because, frankly, it was just too slow to be useful. But over the last year they’ve refocused and made improvements to the core service, and I’ve started using it again for basic blog search. It’s back on my list of top apps.

TripIt

If you travel a lot, you are going to love TripIt. It keeps you organized, it’s incredibly easy to use and it’s just a perfect, simple service. Read our post on TripIt to get an idea for how it works. You forward confirmation emails from flights, hotels, etc. to the service and it creates an itinerary automatically. You can then access it via a mobile device.

Twitter

I don’t know exactly how to describe Twitter. For people like me it’s a microblogging platform that allows me to push small bits of information – opinions, links, updates – to people who are interested. It’s become a part of my everyday life, and a great way to stay up to date on what friends are up to.

Wordpress

It would be hard to underestimate how much Wordpress makes my life easier. It is the blogging platform that runs all of the TechCrunch network sites, and has been on the list all three years. Their Akismet spam comment blocking service is a godsend – without it we would quite simply be overrun with spam. It catches 15,000 or more spam comments per day and auto-deletes them.

YouTube

YouTube was also on the list last year, and it’s grown exponentially since then. I use it for entertainment (nothing good on TV? There’s always something good on YouTube) and work (we post most of our videos there and embed them here on TechCrunch). Sure they sent us a Cease & Desist letter a while back, but I still love em.

Zoho

Zoho, particularly the spreadsheet application, has become an important productivity tool for us here at TechCrunch. We used it extensively to organize and discuss the hundreds of startups that applied to launch at TechCrunch40 last Fall. Whenever I open Office on my desktop to edit a spreadsheet, I feel the lack of collaborative features keenly. Frankly, Google Docs is just as useful, although Zoho was quicker to launch offline functionality, which gave them the edge on my list. Either product suite is a huge improvement on basic desktop office software.

Almost on the List

Even though I expanded the list this year from fifteen to nineteen companies, there are a bunch of products that could still be added. In the time wasting category there is Duels and KDice. Skreemr is a great music search engine. We also use Docstoc and Scribd all the time to embed documents into posts. I look up traffic stats for startups on Compete daily. And even though I dropped them from the list this year, I still listen to music on Pandora all the time. I have an idea that 23andMe will be on the list next year, after I’ve gotten back the initial DNA results. Finally, Seesmic would almost certainly be on the list, but I left them off because I’m an investor.

And I haven’t even brought up the gadgets that I use every day. The iPhone, the Philips MP3 alarm clock, my Jawbone bluetooth headset. Maybe next year I’ll break out a separate list for gadgets.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

800-Free-411

Jingle’s free 411 service has saved me a serious amount of cash this last year. They now account for over 3% of the U.S. market for information calls, and AT&T has announced that they are going to copy them. That’s good news for consumers, who have to pay up to $3.50 per 411 call today. Our coverage is here.

Amie Street

Amie Street, which launched in July, has a brilliant DRM-free music sales model. Bands upload music, which can then be downloaded for free by users. As songs become popular, the site starts to charge for it. They start at $0.01 and go up to $0.99. Users looking for popular new stuff go right to the more expensive songs. More adventurous types try out lots of new music. I’m somewhere in the middle. This free-market place to set the value of DRM-free digital music could be the future. Our coverage is here.

Ask City

Bloglines dropped off the list this year, but another Ask.com property, the recently launched Ask City, has been added. In our very subjective opinion Ask City has replaced Yahoo Maps as the best mapping product on the Internet. My favorite features are multipoint directions an the annotation tools that allow you to draw and write on a map before forwarding to friends. Ask City is less than a month old and it’s already one of our favorite apps. Our writeup is here.

BlueDot

BlueDot is a social bookmarking service that is similar to del.icio.us. I’ve started using it instead of del.icio.us becasue I like the interface better and it allows sharing of bookmarks just among friends, whereas with del.icio.us you have to choose between fully public and fully private bookmarks. The company launched in July and had an update in October.

Digg

Anyone who reads this blog knows my position on Digg, where users pick what news makes it to the home page. It’s the future of news, and the most disruptive force to mainstream media since blogs were born. Digg has to continue to battle spam while pleasing its most active users, which won’t be easy. But I use the Digg site every day. Our coverage of Digg is here.

Flickr

Flickr is our first holdover from last year’s list. In the last year we’ve seen a bunch of startups gunning for Flickr, but as of now it is still the photo tagging and sharing site that we use every day. The new geotagging feature is incredible. We’d like to see facial recognition, similar to what Ookles is doing, next. Our coverage of Flickr is here.

Flock

We’ve been fans of Flock since we first started covering it during the original Bar Camp in August 2005. It just feels like a complete ecosystem rather than the hodge podge of sometimes incompatible additional add-ons that you get with Firefox. If Flock didn’t exist I’d be a happy Firefox user, but it does, and I use it as my primary browser. The rumor is that they have a big new release coming very soon. Our coverage of Flock is here.

Gmail

Despite recent problems, I think Gmail is now at least as functional as most desktop email applications (like Outlook and Mac Mail), and darn close to perfect. The reason? Lots of storage, the ability to tag emails and the recent addition of POP access to other email accounts. All for the great price of – free.

NetNewsWire

I’ve used NewsGator’s NetNewsWire desktop feed reader from the moment I switched to a Mac in early 2006. It’s not free, but having fast and offline access to feeds was worth the $30 I paid for it. Bloglines dropped off the list because of NetNewsWire, although I expect to be moving over to Google Reader in the near future. Offline access is less important now that I have EVDO cellular access, and Google Reader made significant improvements to its product in its September upgrade.

Netvibes

Netvibes is another holdover from last year. We go there multiple times per day to get a quick overview of a few important feeds. The company continues to gain users at a torrid pace, and has plenty of money in the bank after a $15 million round earlier this year. My guess is Netvibes is fending off multiple acquisition offers at this point, and may not be an independent entity at the end of 2007. Our coverage of Netvibes is here.

Pandora

Pandora is yet another holdover from last year, and a company that we’ve covered since before its launch in 2005. My bet is that I’ve racked up more hours listening to music on Pandora than any other user – it’s almost always playing while I write. Millions of loyal users agree with me. Our coverage is here.

Skype

Skype may be the single biggest productivity booster since email. I use it as my primary instant messaging client, and of course for free on the fly calls almost daily. Skype is one of the Internet’s killer apps. Our coverage of Skype is here.

Techmeme

TechMeme is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. Stuff on TechMeme hits the New York Times and other newspapers days later. My father is as addicted to Techmeme’s political sister site, Memorandum, as I am to the technology news area. Our coverage of TechMeme is here and here.

Wordpress

We’ve been mostly happy customers of Wordpress since TechCrunch started. It’s the most flexible blogging platform, and their Akismet comment spam blocking service has saved us from nearly 1 million spammy comments. We’d have to hire a full time person just to moderate comments and trackbacks if Akismet wasn’t as good as it is. Our coverage of Wordpress is here.

YouTube

YouTube is far from being a young startup, having been acquired by Google for $1.65 billion earlier this year. And even though they sent us a cease & desist letter just two months ago, we remain YouTube addicts. Fire Engines! Bananas! Humanity is a beautiful thing. Earlier YouTube coverage is here.

Almost on the List

A few companies almost made the list as well – AllOfMP3, AllPeers, Last.fm, Meebo, Wikipedia and Zoho were right on the edge, as well as others. I just had to cut the list off somewhere.

Agree? Disagree? Tell me all about it in the comments.

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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.

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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.