Well, that’s it then. Today was the last day of AmieStreet.com, one of my most favorite online stores out there. If you’ve never heard of it before: Amie Street was a rather indie online store for music with a quite unique pricing model. Basically, the more popular a song became, the more it cost, but no more than just under a dollar. So when a new album was released, it usually ended up pretty cheap at first but the most popular tracks (based on actual recommendations) got more expensive over time.
Another sadly unique aspect of Amie Street was, that you could download your purchased songs as many times as you liked or export all your purchases as one large zip. You could even stream them directly from their servers which was really useful at work sometimes :D
So what now? Well, Amie Street has been financed partly by Amazon for quite some time now but on Sept 8 the shock was quite hard for me when it was announced that Amazon had bought Amie Street just to close them down :-( At least the team gave an advance warning (about 2 weeks) until the closing of the site, so everyone could still create a backup of all previously bought songs and spent their last credits. But now we are once again mostly stuck with iTunes and Amazon MP3. Sure, there is also Beatport, but at least I know of no store comparable to Amie Street when it comes to diversity and UX. *sadpanda*
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