Amie Street

» see amiestreet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i missed amie street. wrong region, wrong era, wrong scene. by 2006 i was finishing engineering school in ankara with a desktop full of mp3s already pulled off file-sharing networks. close enough. the idea of paying anything per track was years out from my habits, the idea of paying a variable price that rose with popularity was something i would have laughed at in 2006 and possibly still in 2010. the store was for american indie music buyers who wanted to feel like early adopters on an unknown artist. that was an east-coast college thing, not an ankara thing.

amie street launched july 4 2006 in providence rhode island. the founders were five brown university students, elliott breece and elias roman and joshua boltuch on the original team, with peter asbill and eric davich joining in the early period. close enough. the pricing trick was the whole pitch, every song uploaded started at zero dollars, then rose as people bought it, capped at 98 cents per track. the artist kept seventy percent of every sale.

the demand-pricing thing made it onto every tech-blog "interesting startups" list in 2007. amazon led the series a round in august 2007, with robin richards from mp3.com and david hirsch from google on the cap table. close enough. by october 2008 amie street acquired songza, a small music-streaming play built by aza raskin and scott robbin, and rolled it into the company portfolio. the company moved from providence to long island city in queens around that time.

amazon bought the whole company in august 2010 for an undisclosed amount. on september 8 the closure was announced, on september 22 amiestreet.com started redirecting to amazon.com. close enough. customer credit balances got moved over to amazon mp3 accounts. the founders kept songza as a separate product and spun it back out as their main focus. anyway, four years later in 2014 google bought songza for around $39 million, the team finally got their real exit on the second startup rather than the first.

~ the record ~

~ the pricing trick ~

the demand-pricing model was elegant on paper. close enough. an unknown artist uploaded a track at zero. early listeners got it free as a finder's reward. the price stepped up as buys accumulated, on a curve that capped at 98 cents per song. by the time a track hit the cap it was technically popular enough to charge full price for. the artist kept seventy percent of every sale at every price point. the buyer who got in at five cents felt like they had picked a winner before the market noticed.

the model worked for the demographic it was designed for. brown students browsing indie uploads enjoyed the bargain-hunt aspect, artists liked the discovery-pricing angle which got them in front of curious early buyers (close enough). the trick was that the mainstream itunes audience did not care about discovery, they wanted a known track for a fixed price and they wanted it in their itunes library. amie street's growth flattened against that wall by 2009.

~ the acquihire ~

amazon's acquisition was an acquihire dressed as a store purchase. amazon had already launched amazon mp3 in september 2007 and did not need another download store. close enough. what amazon wanted was the team and possibly the data, the public framing was that the company was being absorbed into amazon's music strategy. allthingsd called it correctly at the time, "amazon buys amie street, shuts down store, focuses on streaming music."

elias roman and the rest of the founders walked away with the songza piece and amazon got whatever it wanted from the closed pieces. close enough. the songza spin-out turned into a curated playlist streaming service that survived for four years on its own before google paid around $39 million for it in july 2014. anyway, that money was the real exit for the team, the amie street brand was the price of admission to the real deal.

~ what got buried with it ~

the demand-pricing idea died with amie street. nobody else picked it up at scale. spotify and apple music and amazon music all settled on fixed-per-track or subscription, the "price rises with demand" curve never showed up in another mainstream music store. close enough. it survives in concert ticketing and a few crypto-adjacent music experiments, neither of which is amie street's heir in any practical sense.

the indie-discovery role that amie street tried to play got absorbed by bandcamp, which had launched the same month in september 2008 and ran the same pay-what-you-want angle with a less complicated pricing curve. bandcamp is still operational in 2026 under songtradr ownership, the model amie street tried to invent showed up across the wall as the model bandcamp shipped without the math (close enough).

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