notes and views on crm, social media, and the human side of information technology

Amiestreet: How To Resuscitate The Music Business

THE SEARCH FOR NEW BUSINESS MODELS in music distribution has been a long and tiring one. It’s been RIAA vs the pirates and whatever your position is, it’s hard to say which side is winning. The one that’s been losing is easier to spot: the musicians. Robbed by the recording industry dinosaurs AND the bittorrent generation jointly.

Which is why I so love Amiestreet.

It’s a perfect market. Bands upload their songs. They’re initially free for a download; as they get more popular, their prices goes up until it reaches a pre-determined ceiling (98 cents at the moment). The band gets 7o% of the rate. (which is like, what, 69 points more than they get from a label?)

You, a listener, buy a credit and spend it on songs you like. But it doesn’t stop there: for every dollar you get a matching number of a social-network currency called a REC, which is basically a vote that you can cast to support the music you like. That the number of votes you get is constrained is supposed to prevent artificial “inflation of popularity” by overzealous fans. Clever!

Plus: the songs you download are DRM-free, thank goodness!

This is an attempt I passionately support: to re-introduce elementary principles of free markets to the music business so that both producers (musicians) and consumers maximize their value while the role of the middleman diminishes. It’s free of the Napster anarchy AND the music label dictatorship. And, happily, it’s free of amateurism as well: I could find a track I liked in a matter of minutes (Plastic Mary, loved your songs!).

What they should do to take this even further is to create a channel for fans to connect with the bands. We’re not talking about Madonna and her gazillion bodyguards, hairdressers, lawyers and such: it should be much easier to reach a level of intimacy with a band that’s brave enough to release their stuff there. So, if the key business differentiator today is to “attract high quality online networks of interesting and engaged users“, where else to begin than here, in the marketplace of music? You can’t find more passion anywhere else.

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March 20, 2007 | Filed Under CRM, Enterpreneurship 

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2 Responses to “Amiestreet: How To Resuscitate The Music Business”

  1. Gary on March 21st, 2007

    What happend to them? I set up an account a few days ago and then today I tried to access their site and they’re gone already…did they just close up and leave with our money?

  2. Tomas Kohl on March 21st, 2007

    I just checked and everything seems normal. Maybe your DNS server was down for a while?

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