Another day, another social site/music store: Amie Street
I haven’t really come across much talk about Amie Street across the net, in blogs or on forums, which seems unusual given its apparently novel approach to music sales (I guess it could use a few more artists on there).
Rather than assume a fixed price for album and single track sales, the pricing structure varies according to the track’s popularity. At first, the music is available for free download, then as the tracks rack up download counts the price goes up by a few cents, until it settles on a price deemed fair by the listeners, i.e. what they’re prepared to pay for it. The tracks are eventually capped at the heady heights of ninety-eight cents each.
As a new member, all my tracks currently on there are free—just put a check next to all the tracks you want, select download in the actions drop-down (or alternatively click on the whole albums you want), sign-in, and you’ll be presented with a zip of your selected tracks.
I’ve uploaded the same 320kbps mp3s that I’m currently selling here (a little artistic licence with the term selling—’for sale’ would be more accurate! 
) so the quality is as good as you can get with an mp3; the only difference being you support me directly via my own store and have a chance to download the FLACs too. But as the tracks on Amie Street are currently free, you may as well grab them there, and leave a ‘REC’ (that’s recommendation to you and I) for your favourite tracks, and help me gain a little more exposure on the site.
The REC system works by remunerating those who have REC’d tracks, giving them money back as the tracks gain in popularity, incentivising feedback and helping listeners find other similar tracks they might enjoy by other artists.
It’ll be interesting to see if and how this takes off, but what do you think? Have you used Amie Street or anything similar?
Anyway, get downloading, tagging and REC’ing!
Tags: amie st
3 Responses to “Another day, another social site/music store: Amie Street”:
Awesome. Is there any discernible difference between the VBR quality downloads you offered for free not so long ago on this site? If not, i wont go and replace my downloads that i have. I did grab the artwork though :p .
Thanks! You’re so generous with your music.
Not a huge difference to be honest—I think I encoded the old VBRs at V2, so they should still be pretty hifi.
However, many of those tracks previously encoded were rescued from an audio CD (thanks again Mark A.
) which, in the process of encoding, resulted in a few milliseconds of the previous and next tracks being heard at the start and end of some tracks—i.e. the CD track markers will have been a few frames ahead of the actual track start.
Since launching my own store, and not expecting listeners to have to endure such apparently sloppy edits, I corrected these issues and re-encoded. It’s down to whether it bothers you or not, I guess.
Looks like it could be fair to both newcomers and artists with a reputation, such as you
. /me goes browsing.