AmieStreet.com, a fast-growing digital music store with a unique demand-based pricing system, announced today the completion of its Series A financing led by Amazon.com, Inc. . The amount of Amazon’s investment and the terms are not disclosed.
AmieStreet.com is the first digital music store propelled by social networking, where members of the community drive the discovery, promotion and pricing of music. All songs on AmieStreet.com start at a price of zero cents. As more people download a song the price rises, capping at $0.98.
For recommending their favorite songs to their friends, members are rewarded by receiving credit for the purchase of additional music on AmieStreet.com. The more popular a song becomes after a member has recommended it, the more credit he or she receives to spend on music.
Funny, I really see this working the other way around. Songs getting cheaper and cheaper and eventually free as it becomes popular. Does this not make more sense?
#1: Yes, if economies of scale came into play – but with digital music the costs of production and distribution are almost identical regardless of how many songs are sold.
Every time I think the web is getting stale, someone comes out with a new idea like this, that capitalizes on the unique strengths of the web. I love this idea. It is an example of capitalism at its best. Low cost for purchasers (early adopters) who are taking a risk; caps to ensure that they don’t price themselves out of the market. Brilliant!
Nothing beats the pricing model of MP3Sparks.com.
However I would buy from a Canadian/US company that sold songs at 0.25$/ea, or 2.50$ per full CD, that :
– easy to download, with an installed program (instead of browser)
– no DRM
– 192kbs minimum encoding
Now to get some VC going, I could build this system. About 250K$ for the hardware, 200K$ for the software programming, and 10M$ for lawyers to make it legal.
Confirmed: The market already did this, and picked $0.00.
“Nothing beats the pricing model of MP3Sparks.com.”
eMusic has drm-free music for $0.33 per song. I’ve tried a number of the music services and the collection I’ve amassed while at emusic is far more enjoyable than all of the others. I was just able to find better music there for some reason.
I found that at sites like napster and allofmp3, I was just replacing what I had on cds and all the new music I was finding was basically crap.
#4 exactly..
I (and many others) will never pay for an MP3..
Although, i would consider paying for the .WAV