New Web site puts artists and listeners together

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By ARTHUR KIMBALL STANLEY
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Tucked behind College Hill and hidden in a small apartment amid the rows of student and family housing, a small group of recent Brown University graduates has created a Web site called Amie Street that it hopes will change the way musicians connect with their audiences and the way downloaded music is priced.

The site, unlike other Internet sites for downloading music, is the first that lets demand set the price of songs. Music that artists have posted to the site is initially available for free and if it becomes popular, or the frequency of its being downloaded begins to surpass certain benchmarks, the price rises.

Users can also publicly recommend tracks on the site and if those recommendations result in a song's increased popularity, thereby raising the price, the recommender is rewarded with credits for purchasing new music.

Amie Street, according to the sites designers, not only encourages listeners to find and recommend good music, it also allows bands to promote and sell their music for free, while rewarding them for creating songs that become popular.

"We designed Amie Street to help independent and emerging artists promote and sell their music in a unique, fan-driven social environment," Elliot Breece, one of the site's founders, said. "We hope musical artists of all types will find our site to be a refreshing platform that makes it easy for fans to discover and purchase their music."

The site was launched on July 4, less than a year after Breece approached a small group of his Brown friends with the hope of starting a Web based publishing company. The initial idea, Breece said, was to figure out a way to monetize the long tail of online digital media.

The phrase "long tail," which was first coined by Wired Magazine journalist Chris Anderson, refers to the idea that statistical models with distributions that can reach very high amplitudes at certain points are often outweighed by the combined portions of the graph's low amplitude. For example, while many more people might like Brittany Spears than a new garage band, the combined number of people who like new garage bands from their town across the country might be greater than the number of people who like Brittany Spears.

By tying a song's price to its popularity and by at first offering a song to users for free, Breece said, he and his partners hoped to create a Web site that maximized the potential number of listeners to new artists, while at the same time creating a way for artists to profit from their creations.

What began on a shoestring budget put together with investments from friends and family has become a site that has already attracted thousands of users, as well as thousands of independent artists from across the country.

Amie Street's founders hope to make money by splitting profits on the sale of music with the artist _ 70 percent going to the musicians and 30 percent going to the site _ as well as through the sale of online advertising space and the sale of demographic information about listeners.

While Breece said he and his partners would ultimately like to sell their creation, right now their focus is on increasing Amie Street's user base among both artist and consumers. The site has already gotten the attention of some major alternative music labels, such as the Vancouver based Nettwerk, which includes Sarah McLachlan and the Barenaked Ladies among the artists it represents.

"Their new model for selling independent music is what interested me," Genevieve Jewell, a promoter for Nettwerk who found the site and began posting her client's music, said. "It helps because it spreads the word, without getting that corporate feel. I think it just needs to have more people become aware of it and it could go anywhere."