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An Anniversary Restrospective- and free money.

I have been part of the AmieStreet community for a little over a year now. I thought that this anniversary would be a good time for a retrospective.

Some simple stats to start with:

In this year, I have

“purchased” 1304 songs and they are available DRM-free for as many downloads as I want or to play online in my library. It is called purchasing a song, even when you get it for free. Since about 2/3 of my library or more are songs I got for free, I tend to think of them as “purchased”, rather than purchased.
earned nearly 150.00 in credits that can be spent on buying more music. Nearly means that I currently have 142.04 in credit, and last December I cashed in about 6.50. There is a detailed transaction history available to the penny, and I could go back and recreate the total if I were feeling that anal, but hey… almost 150.00 is close enough for me on a Monday morning. This means that if I wanted to just cash it all in, I could go on a shopping spree and buy 150.00 worth of DRM free mp3s.

made 340 friends who send me new music recommendations, and hot tips on great new music finds. There are more people than that recieving my recommendations, but I do not keep a count. I make a rec because I love a song and it moves me, not to think about how many people are or are not listening to what I have to say.
lived through a major face lift/site design change. It was all for the better and small tweaks and changes to the site continue on an almost weekly basis.

What keeps me coming back over and over again ? First off it is the very intimate interaction with other users and with musicians on the site ( get your mind out of the gutter- I did not mean that kind of intimate). On a weekly basis, I get emails directly from the musicians after I have rec’d one of their songs. They are not just a form letter “thanks so much for your comments” sort of email, but insights into why they wrote it, what it means to them, discussions about the genre and its evolution. These are interesting, engaging, thought-provoking conversations with talented artists I never would have met out here in small town mid-america, much less ones I would have been able to correspond with. These musicians seem to relish the didactic as much as I do. I even had one musician write a song for me and send it to me. My very own song- how cool is that? Makes me feel a little like Delilah.
Closely related to this is the fact that I have uncovered and come to love music I never would have discovered in my local record store, on eMusic or randomly cruising around the web. The rec system ( in addition to earning you site credits) really works. If you are friends with people who kinda sorta have similar tastes to yours, you are going to end up with more interesting new music to check out than you have hours in the day.
On a technical level, the team has done a great job with the functionality of the site. It is generally very fast, does not force my browser to consume me out of memory and they have a browser based music player that works perfectly, even on my linux computers. That little browser based music player is a hidden gem of the site and as it evolves, I anticipate people starting to think about it and pay a little more attention to it in the future. Now if I could only load external playlists into it and use it to play music on my shared media drive, as well as those on the amiestreet servers, it would get very interesting.

There is even the ability to create mini-players that are embed-able, like this one that will play back to you the last songs I have rec’d on the site:

( EDIT:That player is an example of why I love this company so much. When you are listening to music in the player, you can easily load and listen to a play list of your recs. But when I tried to make an embedded one with my recs, it failed. I instead put in a playlist with Shannon Hurley’s music, and send the support team an email asking what I was doing wrong. We emailed back and forth and it turns out it was not my mistake, but a function they had not yet added. However, they agreed it was an obvious good idea and created this custom bit of code for me to use here, I just got it in my email less than 24 hours later- at no charge. And they say they are planning on adding this in for everyone– so watch for it and you can add this sidebar to your blog soon as well. The development team on AmieStreet has been amazingly responsive any time I have found a bug or had interface suggestions – with replies and fixes within an hour in some cases. 2.12.08)

I do not want to give the indication that I think that this site is a perfect solution and has no room for growth or improvement. Their message handling system is painful to be kind ( they know I think so, I have told them this more than once). If you have a dozen or so friends who make a rec or two a week, it is just fine. As soon as your friends list grows large, or you have friends who are prolifically rec’ing songs, unanesthetized surgery seems preferable to working your way through the messages. They have some basic search features for finding items in either the system database or your own library, but having been spoiled by the over the top search flexibility in iTunes, I always want more. Again, if your library is fine, the existing tools are great- but you want to encourage people to build up a large library of media in your system, right?? I have faith this will come ( and send them monthly email reminders as well), so I will not bitch about it too much. The cashout process is still very clunky, and needs some more refinement to make it easier to decide which song recs you want to cash out and when. This is a lot like playing the market, and more data analysis tools would be helpful. Then again, maybe I am making a big deal out of a potential 98 cent cash out…

Song and album pricing has been an interesting social experiment for me to watch, and it continues to fascinate me. I wish they had some more tracking tools, but that is just me being nosy- not in any way something that would be useful on the site. It is interesting to me that because there are a bunch of people out there who buy only a couple of individual songs, it is possible for the album price to go higher than what you would pay for the entire album on other sites. If all, or most, of the songs on a 13-16 track album get driven to the full .98 cent cap, the album as a whole becomes priced much higher than the 5.99-9.99 album price you see on Amazon.com mp3 downloads ( or even on iTunes). I will admit to at least once discovering very cool music here after it hit a price of 9.99 for the album and buying it on Amazon.com mp3 for 7.99 instead. I am still an old fashioned “album” kinda gal, if I can get an entire album for 35 cents more, Ii will just buy the whole album, even if 2 of the songs are not my favorites. I have not decided if this is just old fashioned or shows some strange psychological trait about me.

The short summary? It has been a terrific first year and I am excited about year 2. I have found, learned and grown to love an incredible variety of music from old classics to brand new never heard before originals. The site is clean, easy to use and continues on a trend of continuous improvements, so I forgive them some few faults.

Their biggest problem? Not understanding and making use of the PR machine. They are music and tech geeks who needs some help with PR and getting the word out. I am constantly surprised how many times they are not mentioned in the media, and how many people I am still introducing to the site. Hopefully they will get some help and make some changes with this and the site will continue to grow. No, I am not an investor, I have nothing to disclose. I just really love this site and want to be able to continue using it. If they went under, I would be endlessly bummed.

Now, for those of you who actually made it to the end of this- the free money. Nope, it was not a gimmick. As a part of seasonal promotions they were doing last year, I ended up with a few 10$ gift packs I can give away. Comment here and tell me your AmieStreet story, or why you deserve the freebie. I will pick the best ones at the end of February and have them sent to you. Be sure you include an email, or some way for me to contact you ( twitter link, etc..) to get the email if your comment is selected.

The Future of Music is FUN!

I am pretty sure I just saw the future of music earning potential, and it was a blast. Tonight I attended a live webcast concert of The Maine on DeepRockDrive ( thanks to TechCrunch for the freebie tix). I dialed in for the Product Launch announcement first and then watched the concert. There is actually a second artist performing at 1am, but it is getting too danged late here in the EST timezone to watch that and THEN do a write up.

Just for kicks, I decided to do a dual trial test and did my first initial beta testing with CoverIt to “livecast” the live webcast. I was not doing this to test the interactive features of Coverit( we will play with that another time), but just to test out the mechanics of it. The archive of that transcript is saved here: http://roguepuppet.blogspot.com/2008/01/coveritarchive.html

But now to focus on DeepRockDrive and the concert.

Here is the setup:
Las Vegas sound stage- a fairly big one, from the pan shots after the announcements. Not a movie set, but nice space. From here you can have Musicians, Comedians, even- god forbid- politicians perform. That performance is broadcast live over the web. In the browser window, you have the video feed, as well as a box to type “shoutOuts” to the band. These are broadcast on multiple large monitors that the band can see. There is also a listing of songs, that the audience can interactively use to vote on the next song they want to hear. You have 4 potential camera angles and you can click and switch between them live at any point. There is a slight lag when switching cameras- at times up to 3 seconds- but the audio continues through fine and it all re-synced seamlessly.

The other audience members were not at any time quiet. The shoutOuts flowed in a fast and furious continuous stream across the bottom of my screen. If you really hate that sort of thing and just want a fine concert experience, go full screen mode and the text chat disappears.

The Maine were a great pick as a first highly promoted band to show.. they have great energy and appeal and even more important, they have the interactive rock gig down pat. They paused between songs to talk to the audience, reading aloud and responding to the messages that flashed on the screen. There was even a series of marriage proposals flying back and forth! It did seem that the band had to step off stage to read the monitors well, then step back on stage to perform again. Because they had mobile cameras, you did not lose visual, but this is something some artists may not be comfortable with at first. The Maine did great, calling people by name, having running chat, and even calling for the audience to type certain messages to respond. There were so many messages flying in simultaneously that there were at times delays of a minute or longer before the message you typed made it to the display. The band did note that everyone’s oddball nicknames and online handles made it very odd and difficult to talk to the by name out loud.. they suggest people use their real names.

Here is the compelling business model I see looming from this. During the product launch, they indicated that in the future real even tickets would cost $6.99. At first this seems like a lot for a web event, but this is a fraction of the cost for real concert tickets. It is even less than typical cover in a bar. This was a fun, high energy event that engaged me WAY more than I was expecting it to. And then I started imagining this with a room full of friends.. I was even standing and dancing to the show here in my bedroom at one point.. I can imagine how silly a group of us with some snacks and drinks would get. This is a concert event I would attend over and over and over again. I am ready to go and cruise the concert catalog right now and see who else interesting is going to be performing soon. They split the concert take with the artist, so the musicians get 3.50/ticket. This does not sound like a lot, but if you can get a few thousand ( or more) people attending an event, that is not a bad take for an evening’s work..

I have to unwind and head for bed soon.. but I am absolutely not done with this topic yet.. Part of me is hotly curious what the web hits on the band page looked like right after this event.. and what the download of their songs does in the next 24 hours. I also have some thoughts about improvements for the deeprockdrive guys, but I am getting too tired to type coherently, my typo rate is starting to scare even me.

although part of me is very very curious if this will play over the wii browser on my tv……. 1am is not that far away, is it??

EDIT:: FYI, I really did stay up and test on the wii… no dice. I am not blaming this on the DRD guys, however- it has to do with the Flash install on the wii. Hulu will not work yet either. Hopefully Nintendo will get their acts together soon, so I do not have to break down and buy an XBox360 or something…

iMeem me?

When imeem.com first beta’d I signed up and checked it out, but it was a very sparse sight and I did not spend much time there. There was nothing that grabbed me hard and made me want to build a home. Then today I was reading this TechCrunch article about Viacom’s newest anti YouTube move, and it mentioned that Viacom was going to distribute video on iMeem. Hmmm.. Maybe it was that, or maybe it was that I was wearing my nifty imeem.com “dezz my jammz” schwag shirt the other day ( I am a schwag whore, I will wear tech schwag any day… send away) and Harv commented on it… but the conincidence of events made me go back and check it out again. I actually finished filling in my profile, and sniffed around a bit. Wow! the place has grown fast and filled in like a sprouting teenager. There is significantly more media that when I first poked around the neighborhood. I was playing with the playlist feature and was happy with how easy it was to create one.. then I found Tiesto stuff on the site. Mmmmmm.. When Tiesto first popped their stuff up on AmieStreet a while back, I was a happy electro-trance fangirl.. and now I can even create and share a cool video playlist with you!.
If you are into media at all, this is probably a site you want to go and check out. If you decide to set up shop in the neighborhood, be sure to add me to your friends and drop me a note!.

I Am a WINNER!!

I responded to a promo on TechCrunch and actually won a free promo ticket to see an online concert on DeepRockDrive. This is a new online event service site, and they are launching tonight. The concert is for a group called The Maine, who by their MySpace page is reasonably good.. so at least the music has potential. I will be online for the announcement and the concert to check out the service and the review will be here either really late tonight or early tomorrow morning. After all the webcasts of the Live Earth concert, it is no surprise to see something like this launch. If you are interested, check it out and let me know if I should look for you there….( I am , of course, roguepuppet on the site…)