I’ve always admired Amie Street from afar. I met the guys on the streets of Austin, Texas during SXSW 2008 and still wear my green “Amie St Lives Here” T-Shirt with pride.
Amie St is an online music store that determines songs prices on the basis of demand. The price for a track starts at zero and rises according to increased demand. The maximum price any song will rise to is 98¢.
Founded in 2006 by Brown University seniors Elliott Breece, Elias Roman, and Joshua Boltuch, Amie St generated all kinds of the right interest being lauded by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, having their capital raising led by Jeff Bezos and the gang at Amazon and being invested in by former president of MP3.com, Robin Richards and David Hirsch, from Google’s B2B vertical markets group.
Golden Brown.
I caught up with Joshua Boltuch to get the lowdown on Amie St’s journey to date.
Can you tell me a little about those early days of inspiration, pre-Amazon investment, while you were at Brown. How have those dreams played out in reality?
Like students across the country we had access to every song we could possibly want, and we could have it all on our computers in the time it took to click download, go to class, and come back to our dorms. It wasn’t as reliable or convenient as iTunes, but we had plenty of time on our hands so the free option made sense even if it meant spending 30 minutes tracking down the album you wanted.
So the question we kept asking ourselves was, ‘with free access to all the music we could ever possibly want, what would get us to spend money on music?’ We quickly saw that the problem had turned into one of choice: with millions of songs to choose from, how do you quickly and easily find new music suited to your tastes? From there the solution seemed clear: create a discovery service that would help people find new music, and help them connect with other music fans – that would be worth paying for.
What’s exciting is that we all believe that our fundamental premise—a first-rate music discovery service is something people want and will pay for—is as true today as it was back then. But…I can say with much humility that we had no clue how big of a challenge we were taking on when we were sitting in our house senior year, dreaming this thing up. On the flip side, I like to think that if we knew then what we know now we probably never would have tried, so it’s better that we were naïve dreamers.
The Amazon Dot Com
How do you see Amie St fitting into the online music retail ecosystem?
I think we have the most inclusive retail model out there. If you never pay for music or if you always pay for music, Amie Street is a really fun and addictive place to discover new music.
For those who don’t want to take out their credit cards, we have tens of thousands of free songs available to download everyday. Plus, customers can earn site credit for more music downloads when they write reviews for songs they like. So members who want to spend time, not money, can actually earn credit to pay for music that isn’t free.
Conversely, customers who want to quickly discover new, up and coming artists don’t have to spend much time to find out what they want. The popular and buzzing music has been filtered for them by the community (particularly the people downloading and recommending the free music) so they can spend two minutes and two dollars and have a great new album on their iPod.
Who do you seek advice from. Who do you admire in the startup space?
We have a whole host of advisors, formal and informal, family members and industry professionals, who have been fundamental to our business and without whom we would not have gotten anywhere near where we are today.
That said, we rely on advice from our customers more than anyone else. Since we started Amie Street we have always depended on the dialogue with members to help us build and make decisions about every aspect of the site. We consistently do “Voice of Customer Research,” including detailed phone interviews and live user testing for new products and features, which helps ensure we’re not just listening to ourselves or accepted industry wisdom.
What is the best example you have of Amie St’s potential? A song/an artist/a band…
There are really so many, both from an artist and a fan perspective. For us, to see members become super engaged discovering and recommending new music is just as positive of an indicator as seeing one of the unsigned artists upload their music on Amie Street, start to reach a new and larger audience, and then get signed by a label.
The Walkmen. Epic band, inconsistent removalists.
What other online music business models do you like ie Hype Machine? Topspin?
We have a lot a respect for eMusic and iTunes as they were pioneers in digital music retail. I use Hype Machine nearly everyday.
Is Amie St profitable?
Sorry, as a private company we do not publicly disclose our financial position.
What is your traffic and how does it breakup in terms of how users get to you (search/direct etc.)?
Initially the majority of our traffic was referrals from artists pointing their fans to Amie Street, and direct traffic from press and the word of mouth buzz the site was generating. As we have grown our search traffic has really started to grow and become a much more significant source of new visitors.
Have there been any unexpected events/tweaks that have greatly improved traffic/usability. (No need to mention Dupre/Lonely girl, I’m aware of those).
There really hasn’t been one silver bullet for us. It’s a lot of iterating, measuring results, and then more iterating. Our biggest traffic spikes usually come from new album releases.
Is there anything that is holding back your growth? What’s the roadblock to Amie St being as well known as iTunes (if indeed that’s ever the plan).
The biggest hurdle has been getting major record labels on Amie Street. We have 1.5 million songs on Amie Street, but currently none of the four majors (EMI, Sony, Universal, Warner) because of our fan-driven pricing structure.
The Amie St Crew.
Do you have any memorable moments on the path to where you are now. Time you had to pinch yourself to remind yourself it was all real? Times you thought it might all come to a crashing halt?
There were all of the above, including moments of serious doubt, but that’s when having my co-founders was so crucial because we were all in it together.
The one story that gets a lot of smiles from people happened when we were out in Seattle at Amazon headquarters. We were meeting on one of the top floors of this beautiful old art deco building, in a conference room that has this stunning panoramic view of Seattle, Puget Sound, and the surrounding mountains. It’s the three of us from Amie Street on one side of the conference table, and on the other is Jeff Bezos and his team of executives in their music and corporate development departments.
And there we were! (You also have to know that five of us were currently living and working round the clock in a house in Hicksville, Long Island. Yes, it’s really called Hicksville). So the meeting is going really well, and then, all of a sudden, something catches my eye, and I look out the window and there is an eagle, just hovering right there! I couldn’t believe it! It was too much! Needless to say, Amazon led our Series A round of financing.
Living the Series A Financing Dream
***
Impressive. Amie St is definitely worth a look.
{ 0 comments… add one now }