.:the bleeding edge of new music:.
from the site:
- Discover and buy new, independent music at your price.
- Earn free music when you find great songs and recommend them to your friends.
- Download new songs to any mp3 player or listen to them from your Amie Street online library, on any computer, any time.
in a nutshell:
music community driven sales…the common man/woman dictates the worth of a song. gee…what a novel idea. here is yet another way that the music industry will have to adapt in order to please the thousands of niche music markets that now exist.
the idea here is that artists are able to upload their music to the site in DRM-free MP3 formats. this means you as a user can play them on any player you want. the MP3s start off for free. as people continue to download them, they begin to increase in price. a $.30 song generally means that the song is starting to become popular, and a $.99 song is apparently a hit according to the community. there are also some community voting tools too which also help out with how popular a song can get.
for an independent artist, this is pretty great, and they have some cool offerings to help you along. they have an embeddable player for songs that you have on the site…so, for example, it’s easy for someone to embed your music on their myspace site. there’s also a nifty little store application that you can use to sell your music on your web site. the artist gets to keep 70% of the sales after $5.00. i play music and have a CD and i personally think this is yet another great way to increase your reach into the market. every little bit helps…
i really like this idea a lot, main reason being that it is a consumer driven model. i trust my friends’ opinions much more than i trust a lot of music reviewers out there about what is supposed to be new and great. i can only see this not working in the sense that you may not have a diverse enough mix of a site audience in order to make it easy to find a diverse range of good stuff. for example, there may be a disproportionate number of users who are looking for/voting on/downloading a specific type of music; thus, the site becomes biased in its pricing model. the site states that ’songs in the $.30 range means that the song is gaining popularity. songs that reach $.99 are hits’. well…what if all the .99 cent songs are crunk? you could say this is good for the consumer because they’d be able to find really good music in a not-so-popular genre very cheaply, but bad for the artist because they aren’t reaping any of the benefits of becoming a more popular, and popularity in this instance translates into dollars for the artist.
