But on Amie Street (a new music service) you won’t find business men in suits setting prices, instead you’ll find hundreds of musician’s songs for sale for a price the user dictates. The popularity of a song determines the tracks value. When a song is first posted on the site it’s free, that right FREE. The first couple people to download the song get it free of charge so they can sample the song and recommend it to others. The more people who download a song the more expensive it gets, with tracks maxing out at $0.98.

Amie Street thinks of it self more as a social networking site that enables music discover than a digital music store. Recommending or ‘REC’ing a song, as it’s called on Amie Street is how the site encourages users to discover music. If you REC a song you’ve downloaded and the song goes up Amie Street will put the difference into your account. For example if you REC a new song when its at lets say 10 cents and it goes up to 70 cents you get the difference (60 cents) put back into your account.

Aside from the pricing and discovery system there are two other aspects to their approach that make the site fundamentally different from most other offerings. First they don’t use any DRM (digital rights management) which means when you buy the song you can use it however you choose (what a novel idea). Second, they feel that artists should get their fair share, so they give them 70% of the proceeds from each sale (Amie Street does keep the first 5 dollars to cover costs after which the 70% rule applies). The site is still very young and the music selection is not great, but the collaborative user centric approach Amie Street has taken alone makes it something worth following.

The only thing that is missing is a song IPO, but perhaps that is in the works if the site wants to start integrating established artists into the mix?