Amy Winehouse: The Super-Soulful New Sound

Original Address: Amie Street: Awesome New Music Model

Author: Michael Arrington

A lot has been happening recently in the music world, showing that major brands are steadily moving towards selling DRM-free digital music. In my view, this development/evolution is inevitable, and prices will eventually drop to near zero. Services can be sold based on service levels (streaming and download speeds, including music video content and art booklets), but not too much. I will expand on these ideas in an article later this week.

Today, I stumbled upon a newly established website called Amie Street, which may have found a way to help people discover, promote, and price new or lesser-known music. The founders are Elliott Breece, Elias Roman, and Joshua Boltuch, three students from Providence College in Rhode Island, USA.

This is a very nascent site with a few bugs (I could only get the Flash player to work on Firefox on a PC, unfortunately not IE or Macs with Firefox installed), and the interface could use some improvements. But the business model is killer; I've never seen anything like it.

Artists can upload their music to Amie Street for promotion and sales. Users form social networks with friends, listen to, and purchase music. All songs are in DRM-free MP3 format. The songs appear to be at a quality level of 192 kbps, although it might just be whatever the artist uploaded.

All songs can be listened to for free. Prices fluctuate over time based on demand for the song. Currently, the most expensive song is "Against the Wall" by Danny Ross at $0.36. To date, 273 songs have been uploaded. This demand-based pricing model looks like a great way to sell music.

Users can search, browse, and listen to music for free (via streaming). My test download worked well, and the cost of the song was appropriately deducted from my $3 credit account linked to my credit card.

Users who have purchased a song can use a limited number of "recommendations (recs)" they receive (users earn one rec for every dollar added to their account) to recommend songs to their friends. Once recommended, if the price of the song rises, the user's account is credited accordingly. This gives them an incentive to recommend good pieces.

If you recommend a song for a price of one cent or more, Amie Street will pay you half the difference in price. So, if you recommend a song at ten cents and the final price ends up being ninety cents, we will pay you forty cents (half of the eighty-cent difference).

If you recommend a song while it's still free (zero cents), and the final price ends up being ninety-eight cents, we will deposit ninety-eight cents into your Amie account. For users recommending songs that are still free, Amie Street pays you more because you took on more risk, and because we want everyone on Amie Street to recommend those great undiscovered songs.

Artists retain 70% of the revenue after the first five dollars. They don't have to exclusively sell their music on Amie Street and can cancel at any time.

This model is thoughtfully designed. Since most bands don't care if people steal their music—they just want people to hear it—Amie Street can be an excellent way for them to promote their stuff. Myspace has already proven that social networking is a perfect mechanism for promoting music, and the slight adjustments Amie Street makes to this model could make it a winner. It’s something worth keeping an eye on as it prepares for a full public launch.

(Translated by Stephen Zhai, visit his site for foreign media reports and Chinese translations of blogs.)