Amie Street: Low Cost, DRM-free Music Downloads
By Guest Author Steven Finch
Amie Street is an online music store that has two key features: their unique pricing model and DRM-free downloads.
The Amie Street pricing model is quite simple - all songs start free and rise in price the more they are purchased. So as the demand increass, the price goes up accordingly. At present there is a cap at which is the maximum price a track can sell for, which is $0.99.
The site overall is well designed and they highlight their key selling point nicely. However the online music store market is quite crowded. Similar competitors include Snocap, ReverbNation and BlastMyMusic. Snocap has focused on partnering with some of the biggest social networks on the web; and this is something that Amie Street should consider too. Currently Amie Street is mostly focused on selling through their store, instead of spreading throughout the web and selling via widgets and social networks. Currently the site has a recommendation service, but no sign of widgets or other distributed mechanisms.
The DRM free strategy that Amie Street has is starting to blossom in the world of online music sales. In April 2007 EMI announced a DRM-free music download offering. That is a premium service, covering EMI's entire digital catalogue, and will enable full interoperability of digital music across all devices and platforms.
However the Amie Street catalogue growth has been limited due to DRM-free being in just its initial stages. Once DRM-free is used by the other major labels and more independent labels, then look for the Amie Street catalogue to grow a lot. Indeed Amie Street could be a market leader in introducing DRM-free to a wider audience.
What do you think of Amie St? If you've used the service, please share your impressions.
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Steven - nice simple writeup about the service which has really been growing bigtime. I interviewed one of the co-founders last November. Here is a link in case anyone is interested in the background on Amie St.
http://www.centernetworks.com/interview-with-amiestreet
Posted by: Allen Stern | August 15, 2007 7:41 PM
You know, the thing that really interests me about Amie St. is that it kind of highlights the oddity of Music. In most industries, goods become cheaper as more people buy them due to the whole economies of scale thing, and things also just tend to get discounted over time.
In music, and this has happened for ages, the exact reverse is true. Things start out super cheap when records first get released in stores to try to drive up sales in the beginning (yay hit charts!), but over time, the price ends up getting driven up--you know, just 'cuz.
The interesting thing here though (with Amie St.), is that the phenomenon is happening because of completely different reasons. It really is different type of economics, if you will, even though the end result is the exact same as what we've always had.
But that's the beauty of an industry like music: there's so many reasons that the economics CAN work in so many different ways, and we're definitely in a time where a radical restructuring to those economics is taking place, and its my belief that we'll end up with an industry that isn't dominated by any one economic model in particular. Rather, we'll see an abundance of models that all work in harmony--for a while at least, and that's what I'm trying to join in on with my startup over at http://www.sawce.net.
Posted by: Lewis | August 15, 2007 8:03 PM
Interesting. If that was not enough music services, soon you'll have, not just innovation, not only outstanding technology, no soon, you'll make your music happy.
Come and try Musana, your music happiness centre at http://www.musana.com.
Posted by: musana | August 16, 2007 1:43 AM
Hey Steven,
Thanks for the writeup.
No widgets you say....
http://www.widgetbox.com/showcase/amie-street
http://amiestreet.com/promote/Datarock
:P
Oh and prices are capped at 98 cents as well.
Thanks again,
Lucas
Posted by: Lucas | August 16, 2007 6:34 AM