my amie bookmark took me to amazon...they immediately tried to sell me a turtle.
my street cred may have been 23, i think i only officially rec'd on amie once.
my tastes were hopelessly and wonderfully obscured in the early 70s by KSHE radio and later by .99 vinyl
cut out bins and JEM import sections.
the amie model was perfect for inexpensive exploration of the obscure (even better than emusic before the change).
i am not sure what is left, i don't have the energy to wrestle and rifle through yard sales and flea markets anymore;
most used cd selections lack the depth (Rasputin's outside of San Jose is one exception i can think of, though i'm sure there must be others).
i guess streaming before buying is an option-if it's free; not sure about the depth there either.
it was fun while it lasted.....i now have some serious listening to do.
I think Amazon bought Amie Street to shut down a competitor and to encourage Amie Street customers to turn to Amazon, first through the $5.00 credit given to Amie Street customers to entice them to browse Amazon's MP3 collection, then through having Amie Street's pages forward to Amazon.
I left with $8 on the table (mainly from RECs that went from zero to 15 cents in the final few days), which I couldn't cash in.
I spent about $1000 over 3 years and got about 60,000 tracks - About 1.5 cents per track. Relatively speaking I was a cash cow for Amie Street, and I doubt more than a dozen people spent more than a fraction of what I plunked down. You can see why I have been skeptical about the economics of the site for a long time.
The whole Amazon thing doesn't surprise me - they were the biggest investor in the last round of raising capital for Amie. My guess is that view was if it made a profit, then Amazon wins; if it doesn't, they have access to the contact info of all of Amie's music hungry enrollees for marketing purposes.
I don't know what the final tally was, but I was somewhere over 5000 in street cred. It's too bad Amazon didn't give us a penny credit each point we had.
I spent about $1000 over 3 years and got about 60,000 tracks - About 1.5 cents per track. Relatively speaking I was a cash cow for Amie Street, and I doubt more than a dozen people spent more than a fraction of what I plunked down. You can see why I have been skeptical about the economics of the site for a long time.
Froggie, aren't you exemplary of Amie's problem? You had a big balance that you weren't spending, and no labels were being paid for their new material. No, I'm not blaming you for anything, for we all had huge credits that we cashed out in the waning days. But we all liked the idea of Amie so much that we didn't see that it wasn't delivering as much product that we wanted (at least at the price we wanted).
But I'm also one of the very few that actually gave them much in the way of real money. I did spend most of the actual money that I put in fairly quickly, but due to their RECing system, I would make enough in REC money to last me for a couple of more months. There were quite a few weeks where I bought over 20 of the top 25 albums, but made enough on the RECs of those albums that they were effectively free, i.e., I might pay 25 cents a track for the new Yo La Tengo, but then I would make 37 cents back per track, and use that money to buy 2 more albums at @15-20 cents a track. A sweet deal for me, but the economics didn't bode well for long-term viability.
Feedburner caches the feed, so it could take a while before it disappears from FB. Also if they have the standard FB setup, FB uses a different feed than the one the site shows, and they may have forgotten to kill it.
>>>Not sure how I will spend my Tuesday mornings from now on, I might have to work.
I hear you on that. Amie was my best pastime - I couldn't DL at the job but I could shop and buy and DL it at home later. With all the crap they've added to the eMu website it's gotten so squirrelly that it drives my venerable work computer, and hence me, crazy.
I just used my five bucks. I purchased Todd Sickafoose's "Blood Oranges", an album I've been wanting for a long time, and in that span of time, I haven't found an affordable physical copy nor has emusic offered it, so I took my five dollar credit and put in two bucks of my own, and now I own an excellent album.
I made out like a bandit with Amie St.; not as much as some, but measured by my own music needs, I am a very satisfied customer. The five dollar Amazon credit was like they took me out for drinks one last time before breaking up with me. I didn't have many of them, but there were a couple relationships I had when I was younger that were just plain fun. They ended exactly when they probably should have, consensually and with warm feelings and fond memories. Not to drive the overused something-as-relationship analogy, but Amie was one of those great relationships where the breakup inspired no hard feelings.
Bye, Amie. Thanks for the drinks. I've been wanting that Sickafoose album for awhile.
Comments
my street cred may have been 23, i think i only officially rec'd on amie once.
my tastes were hopelessly and wonderfully obscured in the early 70s by KSHE radio and later by .99 vinyl
cut out bins and JEM import sections.
the amie model was perfect for inexpensive exploration of the obscure (even better than emusic before the change).
i am not sure what is left, i don't have the energy to wrestle and rifle through yard sales and flea markets anymore;
most used cd selections lack the depth (Rasputin's outside of San Jose is one exception i can think of, though i'm sure there must be others).
i guess streaming before buying is an option-if it's free; not sure about the depth there either.
it was fun while it lasted.....i now have some serious listening to do.
Craig
I spent about $1000 over 3 years and got about 60,000 tracks - About 1.5 cents per track. Relatively speaking I was a cash cow for Amie Street, and I doubt more than a dozen people spent more than a fraction of what I plunked down. You can see why I have been skeptical about the economics of the site for a long time.
The whole Amazon thing doesn't surprise me - they were the biggest investor in the last round of raising capital for Amie. My guess is that view was if it made a profit, then Amazon wins; if it doesn't, they have access to the contact info of all of Amie's music hungry enrollees for marketing purposes.
I don't know what the final tally was, but I was somewhere over 5000 in street cred. It's too bad Amazon didn't give us a penny credit each point we had.
I hope you mean 50,000, because otherwise I'm way too close to you, and Craig's way ahead of you, and that just doesn't seem right or possible.
Brighternow, can you give us his final stats?
frogkopf : 71641
But I'm also one of the very few that actually gave them much in the way of real money. I did spend most of the actual money that I put in fairly quickly, but due to their RECing system, I would make enough in REC money to last me for a couple of more months. There were quite a few weeks where I bought over 20 of the top 25 albums, but made enough on the RECs of those albums that they were effectively free, i.e., I might pay 25 cents a track for the new Yo La Tengo, but then I would make 37 cents back per track, and use that money to buy 2 more albums at @15-20 cents a track. A sweet deal for me, but the economics didn't bode well for long-term viability.
- The only thing that still works is the new releases feed.
edit: Whoops. Goes to Amazon now.
I hear you on that. Amie was my best pastime - I couldn't DL at the job but I could shop and buy and DL it at home later. With all the crap they've added to the eMu website it's gotten so squirrelly that it drives my venerable work computer, and hence me, crazy.
I made out like a bandit with Amie St.; not as much as some, but measured by my own music needs, I am a very satisfied customer. The five dollar Amazon credit was like they took me out for drinks one last time before breaking up with me. I didn't have many of them, but there were a couple relationships I had when I was younger that were just plain fun. They ended exactly when they probably should have, consensually and with warm feelings and fond memories. Not to drive the overused something-as-relationship analogy, but Amie was one of those great relationships where the breakup inspired no hard feelings.
Bye, Amie. Thanks for the drinks. I've been wanting that Sickafoose album for awhile.