I wanted to post a little review of Amie Street from the artist’s perspective.
EDIT: I know this is a long post, the bottom line is that I have no regrets about going with Amie Street. I wanted to provide a little extra info from the artist side.
If you haven’t been following my site, I’ve just released a CD on amiestreet.com. I chose them to do my online release because they have a unique pricing structure and they don’t have any digital rights management on their files. When you first release your music, it’s free. Then it increases in price (as the market dictates) to $.98 per song.
First, I think it’s a great idea. I think the pricing structure is excellent and I think it’s a practical way for an artist who doesn’t have much of a following to develop one through free distribution of his music. Also, it’s great for established artists as well, because they can earn a 70% profit on sales of their music there. For the music consumer, it’s a great place to discover indie artists and get their music for a reasonable fee. The non-drm thing is excellent too.
I’ll also say that they have been very responsive to inquiries and technical help. I even had an interaction with “Josh” at Amiestreet.com who offered to help discuss their business model with me for this blog post. I may solicit his input for a future post, but for now, I will say that they have been very helpful.
I do think buying music could be a little more straight-forward. Right now, you can’t just pay for a song or album with your credit card. You have to purchase credits in fixed amounts. For instance, my CD is $5.30 to buy the whole thing right now. However, you can’t buy the cd for $5.30, you have to buy a $10 credit (or a $5 and $3). I’m guessing it’s incentive for the user to check out other music since they have credit on the site, but it’s inconvenient place for me to send someone who just wants my CD.
Additionally, as an artist, there’s no real-time running tally of your earnings. It’s really not that difficult to compute, but it is challenging to estimate how much you’ve made. The gist of the earning structure is this: for each song you upload, you give the first $5 it earns to Amie Street. Since the price starts at $0 and rises one or two pennies at a time, it takes awhile to amass $5 in downloads. After that point, you keep 70% of the sales. When your sales hit $.98 (the top of the rising scale) it’s simple estimate how much you’re making on each download. Prior to that point, though, it’s tough to know if you’ve paid off your $5 and whether you are making any money per download or not. Basically (according to my chart made using their pricing calculator) after 40 downloads, you start making money.
I’ve created a couple graphics to simplify the estimation process. It seems a little trivial since we’re talking about such small scale sales, but many of the artists on Amiestreet.com haven’t distributed enough songs to make much money, so these charts should be quite useful to at least a few people.
technorati tags: amiestreet, music, drm
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