Amie Street is an intriguing alternative to eMusic

I’ve been an eMusic subscriber since 2001, and it’s been my favorite place to get digital music ever since. What’s not to like? They’ve had DRM-free downloads from the beginning, I can download songs for as little as 25 cents, and they’ve got a huge library of independent music (4 million songs).

Still, I’ve always wished that eMusic could be a bit more like Netflix. It would be nice to easily “friend” my real-life pals, and see what they’re downloading. Amie Street, which unveiled a brand new re-design this week, might be just what I’ve been looking for. As the name implies, Amie Street manages to add some Netflix-like social features, while providing DRM-free independent music at very competitive prices. But Amie Street also includes a couple of innovations eMusic can’t  match.

Users set the price

First, Amie Street’s pricing is weird. I’ll let them explain it:

[A]ll songs on Amie Street are priced from free to 98 cents. Instead of the arbitrary $0.99 per song, on Amie Street the community determines the price of music. Every song starts free, or very cheap, and increases in price, up to 98 cents, as more and more people purchase it. This variable pricing system ensures that the public gets music at a fair, community-driven price point, and makes it easy for you to find the type of music you want. We then encourage you to talk about the music you like by putting money in your account for more downloads when you recommend songs that continue to rise in price.

The upshot of their variable pricing is that it’s pretty easy to get new releases for between $2.50 and $5.00 a record, because the market function hasn’t yet pushed the price up. Older or more obscure releases are also cheap, because many fewer people are buying them. For example, the latest New Pornographers record is $9.98. But you can get their debut album for $6.22.

In my tests this week, I was getting much better prices on less popular stuff, including Jay Reatard’s Matador Singles ‘08 for 55 cents per song and the Red House Painters Retrospective for 21 cents per track (less than I would have paid on eMusic). I bought the brand new Phil Elverum  / Julie Doiron record, Lost Wisdom, for $2.50.

It’s true that many of the most popular downloads are actually on par with prices charged by iTunes or Amazon. And the selection of barely 1 million tracks is only a quarter of eMusic’s considerable library. Still, I only have 90 downloads a month on eMusic, and sometimes I want more. Amie Street is a good second option when I’m out of downloads or I feel like bargain hunting.

You can take it with you

Amie Street’s second distinctive feature is their Web music player. Like eMusic, once you’ve purchased a track, it will show up in your library where it can be downloaded again free of charge. But unlike eMusic, Amie Street organizes your library of songs into an iTunes-like Web player where you can play your songs—and your friends’ songs—over the Internet. From wherever you happen to be.

This has been great for me. I can listen to all my downloads at work. If I want, I can purchase tracks at lunch, listen to them immediately, and then download the actual mp3 files when I get home.

The player itself isn’t all that sophisticated. It has a random button, and you can sort and search you tunes.  You can also build playlists listen to playlists your friends put together. But I’ve not seen another music service that’s even bothered with something this obvious and cool.

Other features

A few other things I dig about Amie Street:

• No separate program is required to download files. All files are ZIP archives that come with the MP3s and album art.
• There’s a focus on recommending individual tracks. When deciding whether to download something,  you can see which particular songs have been recommended by the community.
• Like eMusic, Amie Street recommends music for you, but Amie Street allows you to refine those results by “fanning” artists and labels (i.e., selecting them as your favorites).
• Your history shows what you’ve downloaded as well as the price you paid for each recording. Your history also shows the songs you’ve listened to recently.
• AmieStreet is pay as you go. No pressure to use up your downloads before losing them. And AmieStreet takes PayPal, which is nice.

To summarize, I made a quick comparison chart:

DRM	None	None
Bit Rate	Variable	Variable
Available tracks	4 million	1 million
Purchase model	Subscription	Pay as you go
Payment Method	Credit Card	Credit Card or PayPal
Free music samplers?	Yes	Yes
Downloader required?	Yes	No
Social Features	Difficult to find your friends, can’t share download history	Easy to share and recommend artists. Can play your friends’ tracks through Web player.
Online Web Player	No	Yes
Cost	As low as 25 cents per song with subscription additional  tracks cost between 40 & 60 cents.	Tracks can range from free to 99 cents, depending on popularity. Average price per track around30 to 50 cents.
Re-download tracks free of charge	Yes	Yes
Content from All Music Guide?	Yes	Yes
Additional editorial content and writers?	Yes	No

Overall, I still prefer eMusic for their broad selection and their commitment to original writing and editorial content. But I’ll definitely be using Amie Street to supplement my digital music buying habit.

Eight miles in the snow. Both ways.

I remember combing the racks at the old Sound Ex on Westheimer or Vinal Edge to see if Palace had a new record out.

I used to sit down in front of the wall of magazines at the Alabama Bookstop and read the reviews in Alternative Press.

Josh and I went to Cactus at midnight to buy Brighten the Corners. It totally sucked, and it felt like a kick in the belly, but we felt it at the same time.

I can’t count the number of times I stood tethered to a listening station trying to hear a new CD with of one good speaker.

I don’t do any of this stuff anymore, and I miss having that kind of time to kill. But despite the nostalgia I have for those college days in the Montrose, I think finding and listening to new music is a lot easier now. Certainly, I encounter a lot more of it. The reason, of course, is the Internet.

I don’t want to belabor the point, because I think everyone around my age experienced the same shift at around the same time. The advent of the Web and the post-Napster era of broadband means that we can subscribe to feeds instead of magazines. We can download craploads of music for orders of magnitude less than we used to pay—if we pay at all.

So yeah, you know all that.

I just wanted to take a few moments to share my personal music discovery workflow. This is how I get sounds:

eMusic.com

Yeah, I’m a huge fan of paying less than 40 cents per download, but part of eMusic’s massive value is their commitment to top-notch editorial content. Their editors of the eMusic magazine review a ton of releases and supplement their reviews with features and interviews. They also have an employee blog that highlights new releases and hidden gems. But my favorite regular feature is the eMusic dozen, which collects 12 signature releases in a given category. For example, there are dozens devoted to labels (e.g., Southern Lord, Sun Records) and genres (More Essential Alt-Country, Scandinavian Jazz). Artists like Brit Daniel, Isaac Hayes, and Chuck D have also contributed their own compilations. Because eMusic is a subscription service and you lose the monthly downloads you don’t use, I’m constantly looking for new stuff. Fortunately, eMusic’s editors do a great job helping me discover new music and classic records I’d overlooked.

Last.fm

Last.fm is best known for its Scrobbler, a software program that keeps track of what you  play on your computer and shares it with your friends. You can see my most recently played artists and songs below.

But I think their Web radio service is underrated. Like Pandora, if you visit the Last.fm Web site and enter the name of a song or an artist, Last.fm will play similar tracks for you. You can also listen to a style or “tag,” such as light jazz or black metal, or to the personalized station for any user (e.g., mrshl, or willadams). Most often, I listen to the “My Recommendations” station, which selects tracks based on all the songs I’ve submitted to My Library via the scrobbler. As different songs play, Last.fm will show you crap loads of information about whatever’s playing, including artist bio and similar artists.

Unlike Pandora, last.fm doesn’t force you to visit their Web page and view their ads. You can access the site through their scrobbling software, which is available on Mac, Windows, Linux and iPhone.

Recently, though, I’ve started listening to Last.fm via the Fire.fm firefox add on, which remembers your past radio stations and lets you access them in the address bar. It’s perfect for work, where it lets me listen to millions of songs without having to plug in a hard drive.

Other sites and tools I use

Metacritic
Reviews of new releases collected from a wide swath of music sites, magazines, and papers.

Jango.com
Another Pandora-like site that I actually like better than Pandora. A lot more control over what you hear, plus a larger library of songs. It’s not pretty, though. Looks like MySpace.
 
HypeMachine
This site aggregates tracks and links from the most popular MP3 blogs around the Web. It’s got integrated Web radio, and it can sync with Twitter and Last.fm.

Pitchfork.tv
The dominant Web zine everyone loves to hate is still awfully useful, especially if you want to see high-quality videos, films, documentaries, and interviews. This spin-off site proves that the much-dissed site is putting their massive cache of ad dollars to good use.

Allmusic.com Blog
As if Allmusic weren’t already ridiculously useful, this year they started a blog, and it’s quickly become one of my favorite reads on the Web. They cover a lot of ground, and the lack of focus on a single genre or era of music makes it a particularly useful discovery tool.

Amazon MP3
I can’t stand iTunes, so Amazon was a welcome competitor. Lots and lots of high-bit rate, DRM-free music, and most of it is cheaper than iTunes. The lightweight downloading software will automatically add your music to iTunes or Windows Media Player.

MediaMonkey
Not a music discovery tool per se, but this is what I use on my PC instead of Winamp, iTunes, or Windows Media player. How good is it? I paid $34.95 for a lifetime license. It’s got features no other player has, and it can handle huge libraries of songs without freezing. Sadly, it’s Windows only.

8tracks
Recently, Muxtape (a site I wrote about here) was shut down by the RIAA. That sucks, but the newish 8tracks (review here) is a better alternative. Unlike Muxtape, 8tracks lets you create more than one mix. It also imports album art, and it allows you to add tracks from other users without having to upload them first. Recommended. Here’s my profile.

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From this list, you can probably tell that I’m not scouring the Web for the most obscure shit I can find.  The sites and tools I mention above are wide nets that allow me to cover an awful lot of ground in a relatively short amount of time. That’s the point of this post, I guess.

When it comes to finding new music, I don’t work as hard as I used to. But I buy more music now. And I listen to more music. I’m not sure the music is as great as what I loved in 1995. I’m pretty sure it’s not. But I haven’t given up trying to find it.

First official post for the Nonalignment Pact

Forgive me, I wasn’t officially appointed the new Saturday person until Thursday, so I’m afraid I don’t have much in the way of prepared remarks. Also, I don’t want to write a long, navel-gazing “about me” post in which I introduce myself.

Better to say that I thought this blog was a bad ass idea when first introduced in late 2006, and I’m dorkily excited to post here once a week.

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eMusic has been gradually compiling their own top 100 list all week. Right now, they list only 100  through 11. Because I’ve had an unfortunate fixation on “indie rock” for much of my adult music life, I own 55 of the 90 listed recordings. eMusic shares the same fixation, which is why I’ve been a subscriber since 2001.

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The new Beck record came out this week. If you weren’t big fans of the last two records, Guero and The Information, I agree. Both were bloated, unfocused, and not very fun. Beck sounded like he was trying a zillion different ideas and discovering none of them worked all that well. Seemed to put him in a bad mood.

The mood is pretty dour on Modern Guilt, too. But the sound is energized and cohesive. The clutter is gone, and the songs stand together like a well built fence—consistent, sturdy construction, with enough space to allow for a nice breeze. There’s a lot of other crap you could learn about this record by reading the reviews, but here is what you must know: it frequently sounds like Queens of the Stone Age.

In a good way.

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This is cool: “Right now, we can equip you with a rebuilt Roland TR-808, TR-909, TB-303 and some floorboards. Interested? Give it a try!”

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Finally, there’s this.

GORBACHOV: THE MUSIC VIDEO - BIGGER AND RUSSIANER from Tom Stern on Vimeo.