Amie Street (pronounced like the name "Amy") is a service that combines social networking with an independent music marketplace. Participating artists earn 70% of the revenue generated by their music, and are not required to exclusively distribute their content through the service. What's unique is that the price of a song depends on how many times users have purchased it. New songs start free, and the most popular ones cost 98 cents. All distributed MP3s are DRM-free, and can be played on any MP3 player.

Another unique feature is their REC system, which allows each user to give a limited number of song recommendations. If a user recommends a song that eventually increases in price, they earn account credit equal to the increase. An additional REC is given to members for each dollar that they add to their account.

The name of the service comes from the name of the street the trio lived on during their senior year, and the website itself operates on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) environment.

The REC feature is very well thought out and definitely an advantage over other independent music services. I see an interesting similarity between Amie Street's idea and Alexadex, a popular service that turned the Alexa traffic ranking system into a stock market style game. Amie Street does the same thing for independent music, except users actually benefit by being rewarded with real cash.

An interview with co-founder Joshua Boltuch is scheduled for October 19th.