Amie Street, one of our favorite new music distribution services (SellABand is up there, too), turns one year old today – we first wrote about them last year a couple of weeks after launching.
Amie Street’s business model is dead simple – Artists upload their music for download on the site. Users download songs, with the starting price at free. When downloads pick up for popular songs, the price starts to rise, all the way up to $0.99. If a song gets to $0.30 or so, you know its popular. The artist keeps 70% of revenues after the first $5 in sales. Songs are sold DRM-free in MP3 format. Users can also generate credit in Amie Street by recommending songs. Only a few recommendations are allowed, but if the song you promote does well, you get credit in your account that you can use to buy other songs.
Well known artists are starting to use the service. Barenaked Ladies, Master P, Romeo and the Meat Puppets are all distributing music on the site, which has now sold over half a million tracks to users.
To celebrate their birthday, Amie Street is giving the first 5,000 signups on the site $2.50 in free credit and five free song recommendations. Just use the promo code “TechCrunch.” Note that we are not receiving any compensation from this. Try it out if you like.