Takumi's Blog

The music business has always been a big industry. There are lots of sites out there trying to sell music better than iTunes. MySpace was created originally for bands to have a place to upload their music for free.

But all of them are missing something. Something important. Their missing the ’social networking’ part. Music is about people. Music is meant to be shared amongst friends.

iTunes prices are a bit too high, so a lot of people still use file-sharing to get their music, and then once they get it, they share it with their friends… But then the businesses miss out on business.

Amie St. is a new music site. And it brought that missing feature with it.

• Amie Street is pioneering the concept of “social music retail.” We’ve combined a digital music store with a social network focused entirely on discovering and buying independent music.

• You take 70% of every song sale after the first $5, which is used to cover our bandwith and storage costs.

• Amie Street is the only music website with a built-in promotional system. On other music websites it is easy for independent artists to sink into obscurity. Amie Street’s model was built to facilitate the discovery and purchase of your music in two key ways:

1. Amie Street gives fans the incentive to discover and purchase your music through our unique pricing model. All songs on Amie Street start free and rise in price up to 98 cents based on the number of times they are bought. The first several downloads of your songs are free because this encourages fans to experiment with and buy your music even if they haven’t heard of you. After these initial promos, the price of your songs increases based on demand.
   
2. Amie Street gives fans incentive to spread the word about your music to their friends through our innovative recommendation system. We reward them for recommending great songs by giving them more credit to download more music. For example, if a fan recommends your song when it’s free, and the price of your song rises to 98 cents, we give that fan 98 cents worth of credit to buy more music.

As you can see, their not competing directly with iTunes, but in my opinion their site will be a success for independent artists. I love the model, and think the flexible pricing is a key thing to winning new fans.

Try it out for yourself and tell me what you think!

I'm not finished with the design of my blog quite yet, please hold on while I fix the comments, archives, and search templates.