Amie Street: Great Application, Great Service

By Reece

To download music, I use a service called Amie Street - a lot - and not just because the founders are fellow Brown University alums. For one, the music on Amie Street is fresher than anything on iTunes and they do a great job of recommending new music based on your preferences with occasional free downloads. It's also DRM free (and always has been), so once I purchase a song, I can play it anywhere. They also let you play your paid-for music, streaming from their site. Pretty cool.

The best part? It's a market. Every song/album starts out cheap or free and prices rise according to popularity - but never go above $.98. I think that's great, and it encourages users to seek out new music before it gets popular (and expensive). Last week, I bought the Harlem Shakes first release after I sampled it on Amie Street and I've been listening to it non-stop. My price? $4.72 (It's currently maxed out at $7. Still a steal for this album!).

Now Amie Street's sold me again with great customer service... well, not me, but my friend Kati and that's sold me in the process... I 'gifted' the Harlem Shakes album to Kati via Amie Street (another great feature) and she wrote to them merely to say:

"i think it is wonderful that you can send music to someone as a gift. that's all. good work."

Their response:

Thanks a lot for getting in touch and I'm glad you like the site. We always appreciate our users taking the time to write us, and its especially nice to have someone write in and highlight one of the features that we're fairly proud of ourselves.

I've passed your email along to the team, and I dropped a few extra RECs in your account as a small thanks. You can REC any song you've purchased and earn money for more music if the song you recommend goes up in price. Please let me know if there's anything I can help with or if you have any thoughts and suggested improvements for Amie Street.

Regards,

Ian Whalen
Amie Street Support
Twitter / Facebook

That's awesome customer service. Sure, it's easier to deal with the happy customers than it is to deal with the unhappy ones, but those happy customers are the ones who are going to recommend your product, who will test new features, who will be there through the successful launches and the probable pitfalls and it pays to keep them happy.

Nice work Amie Street. Harlem Shakes you rock.

You can listen to a couple of their songs on my tumblog, here.

Update:

me: http://goovertime.com/2009/04/amie-street-great-application-great.html

Sent at 12:46 PM on Thursday

kati: so funny. i am currently on amiestreet as we speak

procrastinating

And now she's rambling about all the other great features...

Update #2: Amie Street wrote me a thanks for this post and gave me a few RECs, too! Yeah!