Sony Music Does Deal With Amie Street... But Using iTunes Pricing?
from the how-does-that-make-sense? dept
Well, this is odd. Amie Street is the well known indie music site that lets people purchase music with a dynamic pricing system -- the music is cheap at first, but as more people buy, the price goes up. It has some neat features to it. So it seemed like a big deal to hear that Sony Music had done a deal with the company to offer its music on the site... except that it's not using the dynamic pricing. Instead, it's pricing the music at $0.69, $0.99 or $1.29, based on popularity. In other words: the exact same pricing as iTunes. So what, exactly, is the benefit of offering the exact same pricing on Amie Street? About the only good thing you can say for this deal is at least it didn't muck up the pricing of everything else, like what happened when Sony Music did its deal with eMusic. Though... it is worth noting that Amie Street did recently put some additional restrictions on redownloading songs. Perhaps the company tried to separate out the announcements so that no one connected the two things...? If that's the case, why bother signing with Sony Music in the first place. Amie Street offers no benefit to people who want Sony Music. All it seems to do is go against the very point of Amie Street.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: dynamic pricing, music, pricing
Companies: amie street, emusic, sony music
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Well one of the models will dominate the market in the future and what I see is a lot of netlabels starting to use liberal licenses, magnatune, dogmazic, jamendo, Brad Sucks, Tokyo Dawn Records, SellABand, Loca Records. Until very recently there was no options to people now they are starting to appear and hopefully the leverage will turn to the other side assuming the actual players continue to ignore their costumers and think that there is no legal alternatives to them :)
ps: I'm using Jamendo a lot recently and there is even apps that function as radio and can search for licenses and bring in only the ones that are CC Commons like gnomoradio (ok, ok I'm a linux user LoL)
Copyright can't be changed easily but we can make it irrelevant changing how we consume things and that would be a slap on the face of copyright maximalists and I hope that open alternatives grow in the music market as they grew on the software market.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
They Need To Adapt Their Business Model.
I think Amie Street should rework their business model where the "rec's" and "listens" count as points towards ad-supported revenue and they could let the listeners stream for free. Or they could offer unlimited streaming for a monthly subscription.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Offer They Can't Refuse
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Offer They Can't Refuse
ugh. that's stupidity talking there.
There is no advantage to them working with Sony. It goes against everything their customers love about them.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
This'll be interesting
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
I dont understand why they didnt just ....
Pretty stupid on the part of Amie streets management .... because for damn sure the next label that hooks up with Amie Street will want some other concession.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Amie Street's Open Letter
Amie Street has a fair explanation here.
I've read elsewhere that they're working with Sony to experimenting with variable pricing which I think could be very exciting if it ever happens.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]