New Music Model Experiment: Amie Street

Cayocosta

This is part 3 of a 3 part series on new music models. Part 1, Part 2.

I placed a couple of tracks on 3 different sites to get a handle on how these services work and how well they might help artists promote themselves and/or sell their music.

The Music:

The tracks used for the test were produced, engineered, recorded and written by professionals. Now, I'm not saying that the tracks are anything special; however, they are most certainly competitive with the bulk of offerings I have found available from these services.

Self-Promotion:

There is literally zero artist self-promotion. The tracks are to live or die based solely on the service itself. There are no artist websites, and the acts and songs are - for all practical purposes - unknown.

Amie Street:

Free service. Free streaming for purchased tracks, 60 second streams otherwise. Price per song determined by number of sales - from free to a maximum of 98 cents.

By far the best system of the three I tried, Amie Street does appear to afford at least an initial level of visibility for artists.

Signing up is free and setting up a page is very easy.

After uploading a couple of tunes about 10 days ago, and another track about 3 days later, in total they have received about 150 listens and 50 sales.

The charts are very comprehensive and facilitate the visibility of tracks for several days.

The most interesting aspect of Amie Street is the "rec" system. Recs are recommendations by listeners which entitle them to credit should the song they rec increase in value. Rather than get into the particulars, it appears that there may be a "crew" or otherwise core group of listeners that are responsible for the recommendations of quite a lot of content. What does this mean? Possibly that some of the rec activity is not from disinterested parties. In any event, in my experience this network of listeners help keep new music visible in the charts for a few days.

Interestingly, recs appear to cease at about 50 for any particular song - this seems to indicate that the diminshing potential return in credit for a rec eventually causes listeners to refrain from recommending more expensive (popular) songs. This phenomenon unfortunately betrays the integrity of the rec system in so far as its value as a guide to the best music - for artists with over 100,000 listens still only receive around 50 recs per song. In other words, recs appear to be more like "bets" on particular songs to increase in value, rather than genuine reviews on the material.

However, from a visibilty standpoint, the rec system works well; and in combination with the demand-pricing model for the sale of songs, Amie Street provides a reasonably good system.

Summary:

As with the other services reviewed, the ability to self-promote would increase the chances of success here, although the capacity to do so would render Amie Street, as well as the other services reviewed, superflous.

As far as income from the sale of songs, the recoupable storage fee of $5 per song means that before an artist sees the 70% of sale proceeds, each song must first sell over 100 times, with income commencing only after that point. So, while 70 cents per sale is great, to get to this point is not easy. Whether the Amie Street community is large enough to generate significant sales alone (without self-promotion driving additional traffic) is unknown.

Overall, in my estimation, Amie Street is a worthwhile service, and much better than BitTorrent or GarageBand.