Sony Music Does Deal With Amie Street... But Using iTunes Pricing?

from the how-does-that-make-sense? dept

Wed, Sep 23rd 2009 8:51pm — Mike Masnick

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.

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Filed Under: dynamic pricing, music, pricing
Companies: amie street, emusic, sony music

7 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 23 Sep 2009 @ 10:17pm

Open Source Record Labels list

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.
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ryanve (profile), 23 Sep 2009 @ 10:31pm

They Need To Adapt Their Business Model.
Amie Street was so cool when it first started. The layout was better and it was only obscure indie music. I don't like that Tunecore distributes to Amie Street, and I certainly don't like this Sony deal. I don't like paying for music downloads either. Amie Street may be the only site where I have actually paid for downloads, but I haven't lately seeing as there is so much awesome music available for free.

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.
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Dohn Joe, 23 Sep 2009 @ 10:33pm

Offer They Can't Refuse
No small music retailer, online or otherwise, like Aimie Street can afford to pass up an opportunity like a deal with a major label...it's just bad business to not take advantage.
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Misanthropist (profile), 24 Sep 2009 @ 3:46am

Re: Offer They Can't Refuse
No small music retailer, online or otherwise, like Aimie Street can afford to pass up an opportunity like a deal with a major label...it's just bad business to not take advantage.

ugh. that's stupidity talking there.

There is no advantage to them working with Sony. It goes against everything their customers love about them.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Sep 2009 @ 5:22am

This'll be interesting
They've made kind of a thing on the site about how there's no DRM on any of the tracks, and how once you've purchased something you can store it, copy it, and transfer it to players. For most of the stuff on there it just makes sense to do it that way for the site, consumer, artist and label. But I wonder how Sony managed to agree to it (or worse, if they managed to mess that up, too).
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Hephaestus (profile), 24 Sep 2009 @ 6:13am

I dont understand why they didnt just ....
I dont understand why they didnt just add two fields to their database one that flagged redownloadable (Y/N) the second the fee for re-download. Then the artists/label(s) (SONY) could have choosen if they would allow the file to be redownloaded.

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.
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edavich (profile), 24 Sep 2009 @ 8:23am

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.
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