Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Rolling on Amie Street
Given the problems with emusic I posted earlier, I have been looking at some other options for inexpensive music on the web. The one I've landed on is Amie Street. It's focused nearly 100% on the independent artist, and has even less mainstream music than emusic does. It does, however, have a very interesting pricing scheme. Basically, the instant an artist or group uploads their songs to the site, you can download them for free. As people start downloading them, however, the price increases. The price continues to increase until it gets capped out at $0.98/track. Nearly all of the music I've been downloading has been $0.00 - $0.40/track.
(Wikipedia says: "As of August 5, 2007 15 buys yielded a price of 1¢, 25 buys yielded 15¢, 50 buys yielded 50¢, and 84 buys yielded 98¢.")
A big advantage over emusic is that you an pay for songs as you go (emusic requires a monthly commitment). Or, even cooler, they periodically have 50% off sales, where you can deposit funds into your account and get twice as much money on account as you actually deposit. I did that a few weeks ago. If you use that method exclusively, then your downloads are really capped out at $0.49/track--and quite a few are less than $0.20/track!
Anyway, I wanted to check it out for a bit before giving it my official recommendation. I've now been downloading music from them for two and half weeks, and I give it a "thumbs up". I have spent about $57 so far, and have downloaded 55 albums. You do the math!
If you're interested, here's my profile: http://amiestreet.com/user/jcolton. If you look under the "My RECs" tab on the right hand side, you can see which songs from which albums I've liked the most.
Warning: the search function is really horrible. There have been albums that I *know* are on the site (because I downloaded them), that I was unable to find using "Search". It is pretty good at giving you recommendations based on your ratings or the recommendations of people in your "network", though. It also has an excellent music player built into the site, the best I've seen in similar websites. And after you've paid for (unless it was free...) and downloaded music, you can use the player to listen to the music from any internet-connected computer.
(Wikipedia says: "As of August 5, 2007 15 buys yielded a price of 1¢, 25 buys yielded 15¢, 50 buys yielded 50¢, and 84 buys yielded 98¢.")
A big advantage over emusic is that you an pay for songs as you go (emusic requires a monthly commitment). Or, even cooler, they periodically have 50% off sales, where you can deposit funds into your account and get twice as much money on account as you actually deposit. I did that a few weeks ago. If you use that method exclusively, then your downloads are really capped out at $0.49/track--and quite a few are less than $0.20/track!
Anyway, I wanted to check it out for a bit before giving it my official recommendation. I've now been downloading music from them for two and half weeks, and I give it a "thumbs up". I have spent about $57 so far, and have downloaded 55 albums. You do the math!
If you're interested, here's my profile: http://amiestreet.com/user/jcolton. If you look under the "My RECs" tab on the right hand side, you can see which songs from which albums I've liked the most.
Warning: the search function is really horrible. There have been albums that I *know* are on the site (because I downloaded them), that I was unable to find using "Search". It is pretty good at giving you recommendations based on your ratings or the recommendations of people in your "network", though. It also has an excellent music player built into the site, the best I've seen in similar websites. And after you've paid for (unless it was free...) and downloaded music, you can use the player to listen to the music from any internet-connected computer.
# posted by John Colton @ 12:53 PM 
