Deal Radar 2008: Amie Street and the Twenty First Century Renaissance

AmieStreet.com is an online music destination that allows (a) musicians to release, (b) music fans to discover, and (c) listeners decide the price they would like to pay for new and independent music over the Internet. The site has excellent music.

In August 2007, Amie Street raised an undisclosed amount of Series A round of funding led by Amazon.

Amie Street makes money by selling non-DRM music. It shares the revenues with the artist who gets to keep 70% of revenues after the first $5 in sales. It follows a demand based-pricing model for the songs.

Amie Street has a traffic rank of 62,291 and 25,802 monthly unique visitors (Compete). According to Amie street, average first time purchase is around $10 and members on and an average spend 8 minutes on the site on each visit.

I like the revenue sharing model and the ranking of artists by popularity of downloads. It is no doubt a good platform for promoting talent and could well change the way music is bought and sold.

At some level, actualizing “talent” is a very difficult challenge for those who possess it. Especially for writers, artists, musicians, and other right-brained people, “business” does not come naturally. If ventures like Aime Street can tap into the vast creative force that exists in our world, and help put together a sustainable infrastructure for actualizing and monetizing such talent, I for one, would be their eternal admirer.

Amie Street will be a good acquisition target for Comcast, Viacom, Time Warner, etc.

Amazon has already invested in the site and has also entered the music downloads business. I see a lot of synergy that Amazon could exploit by acquiring Amie Street. Amazon actually is dabbling in the “talent marketing” game in the writing arena as well, with their Kindle, New Author Contest, etc. so it seems like their heart is in the right place.

A true twenty first century renaissance will come about when we marry the great advances of technology and business with those in art, culture, and spirit.

This segment is a part in the series : Deal Radar 2008