Amie Street is one of my favorite startups right now, partially because they are the embodiment of (what I consider to be) the perfect music model: DRM-free MP3s sold at pure market driven prices.
The company’s business model is dead simple – Artists can 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.
We’ve followed the company through its beta and launch periods. Until now, though, the company wasn’t doing much with all the pricing/popularity data they were gathering. Yesterday, however, they started allowing people to vote on songs directly (like Digg and the recently launched iJigg), and launched new areas of the site to show popular songs.
Amie Street has also released tools to help artists promote their songs, including an embeddable player for any song (see this MySpace page for an example) and a tool to allow artists to create Amie Street song stores on their own websites.
The company says they are currently in the process of raising a Series A round of capital. In this funding environment, I don’t think it will be very hard for them to close that round. All three of the founders, Elliott Breece, Elias Roman and Joshua Boltuch (pictured here) are still, I believe, in college.