Four Pillars: Amie St

I’ve just signed up an alpha trial with Amie St, who’ve come up with an unusual model for acquiring and distributing music.

I quote from their blurb:

• Amie Street is all about letting its users decide how they want to discover new, independent music, who they want to share it with, and how much it should cost.
• Songs are sorted by 4 different measures of quality, just waiting to be discovered by you and your friends. We’ve made the process of sending song recommendations to, and getting them from, your friends as easy as pie. Shucks, we’ll even pay you to do it. We are striving to support new quality artists by helping them gain exposure to a larger audience while also helping them to survive financially, and to provide music fans a place to find quality new music and interact with the artists as well.
• Artists upload their songs to their Amie Street Store with no upfront costs. That song starts free on Amie Street and as its popularity grows so does the price. Artists earn 70% of each dollar a song makes after the first five dollars, which are used to pay for storing the song and maintaining the site. At no point does Amie Street take ownership of an artist’s music, nor do we ask that you sell your music exclusively on Amie Street- It’s your art! We do, however, ask for advance notice to remove your songs from the site.

Downloadable DRM-free. Royalty payments made via PayPal. A secure credit card processor that accepts initial deposits of as low as $3.00.

I know it’s early days yet, there’s no real “liquidity” as yet, and I know that Malcolm and Sean think porcine aviation will be the norm before I see any music I like on a site like this, but I’m not going to learn about what’s happening unless I participate. So I have.

Take a look and let me know what you think.