Amie Street - happy birthday!

Today is the day we celebrate the 1st year of Amie Street. 21 days after its launch, I was already signed and addicted to their service. Amie Street is, at their own words, "a social network centered around the discovery of new music", but they are a lot more than that - as a matter of fact that's not a way I would describe them.

Amie Street is an online music store that sells DRM-free mp3's, each of them at a price that goes from 0 to 98 cents (or, in other words, from free to less expensive than with-DRM iTunes files). As I said last year, when I uploaded there my own music for sale,

So, what do these guys give of so new? As a matter of fact, their business is quite simple: artists give their music for free there, music is rated, the best rated songs move from free to costing money and getting more or less expensive depending on being more or less rated. To avoid bad ratings or people not caring about rating at all, they pay money for users that especulate well (telling that a band will start selling well and being right gives good money for the artist and for the raters).

So, where's the flaw? Well, people can simply not buy non-free music, so that since the moment a songs start costing money can be the moment that the song stops selling, until is free again. But comparing that to having the song forcefully free (like in those other services), well... I just guess that no artist has nothing to loose with this.

The only problem I see with this service until now it that it is way too buggy, and has a really small selection of music (yet). Considering that the site is still at it's "Alpha" state, I'm not really worried about it, tho.

In January I wondered if they would survive for long: I even posted some graphs back then, so here's another visits graph today:

Does "one year" means that they've made it? Well, it means that they've made it through the first year - but nothing more. They're removed the "alpha beta" tag, for instance, but that doesn't really mean that their website is stable or perfect - it surely isn't. Also, they have to do some serious thinking about their business model, if they want to keep up with the latest trends. In the "selling DRM-free music business" they'll have Amazon entering the space, in the "giving money to small artists business" they'll have ad-supported free solutions to care about, like the long-awaited reverbnation feature. Well, let's wait and see, next year I hope we're both still be here to talk about it.

Techcrunch is giving free music to celebrate Amie Street's birthday.

Happy birthday!