Amie Street purchased by Amazon.com - Who will notice?

This blog was originally formulated to highlight music found and purchased through AmieStreet.com but has in the last year and a half, strayed from this formula to include music found and delivered through other means as well.  On Tuesday, AmieStreet.com (AS) announced that it had sold the business to Amazon.com for an undisclosed figure.

Who will notice?  Well, not me.   Amazon.com has been investing in AS for the past 4 years and with each investment, the likelihood that you would be able to find the struggling independent artists-the jewels in the rough if you will-has decreased with each year.  This was the reason I was so excited when I found AS, clear back when they were in the beta phase.  In the past year and a half, AS has become the dumping ground for any number of labels trying to get every last penny they could from some pretty questionable "talent."  So much for the struggling independent artist.

Increasingly AS has cowed to the investment dollar, and the original formula that worked so well to lure me in has morphed into something unrecognizable from the original AS.  It's really too bad.  AS had an exciting formula: let the music speak for itself.  The original plan was that all music would start as free and would rise in price as it was purchased.  Artists such as "Jukebox The Ghost" saw their music start at 0 and go to the top of the price scale-because it deserved it.  Not because some label or middle man had arbitrarily set the price, but because the music "spoke for itself."  That too, had increasingly disappeared from the AS profile.  Music began to appear at 15 cents per track, then 45 cents, and sometimes there was no pretense to applying the original formula.  Suddenly, AS was no better than-and in some ways worse than-any one of the major download resellers.

I've missed the original AS for more than a year now; probably more than two years; But I'll not mourn their passing much now.  After all, it's not like there was much left of the original AS anyway.