Winners of each category “can receive two badges for the 2010 SXSW Interactive event, a write-up in the April issue of SXSWorld magazine, plus additional prizes yet to be announced.”
AmieStreet doesn't reward you for discovering music early as much as it penalizes you for discovering it late. Even if in the long run you would end up saving about the same or more, it's a mental hurdle that's hard to get past.
Adding to this a bit, the brilliance of Popcuts is that I, musical tastemaker, now have a monetary incentive to wade through the all the new crap that gets pumped out at a prodigious rate these days, find the gems, promote them to my friends, and not throw them up on limewire or bittorrent. Popcuts is so frickin brilliant, honestly. I could maybe actually earn a living from this (okay, probably not, but I'm 14, maybe I can convince myself that I could), as opposed to just saving a few bucks. That's the difference between the two.
The idea on AmieStreet is to constantly scan for new songs, and "REC" (Recommend it) - if you catch a song early enough in it's rise up to $0.99 you basically get $.98 per REC that you make (presuming you are able to anticipate the taste or memetic attention of the masses).
The obvious attraction on AmieStreet is the sliding scale for music:
An investment of $18.75 gets you $25 worth of purchases and 26 RECs.
If you are half decent at picking music, you usually make between $0.25 - $0.50 with a bit of effort on those RECs - call it conservatively $0.25 * 26 = $6.50 + the $25 = $31.50. Your average song, if you are an active user and can catch things early averages around $0.35 for the really good stuff (ignoring the large amounts of free to $0.10 cruft that you probably don't want in your playlist anyways) - so $31.50/$.35 = 90 Songs for $18.75 - with the sense of satisfaction that a significant portion of your money is going back to the artist who made the music. (Do kids still care about that these days - I am so out of touch. :-) )
I just picked up "Live, by Luna" - a stellar album for $3.22 - in a solid 256 KB VBR MP3 format. Not to mention I can both
A) Play the music from the web when I wish to
B) Redownload if I wish.
I guess the big difference between popcuts and AmieStreet is that you are limited to $0.98 * your RECs on AmieStreet, wheras it appears that PopCuts has a higher payout, but a larger payin per song - they are all $0.99 compared to the "starts at free and frequently pretty cheap" on AmieStreet.
It will be interesting to see how the balance of cheap versus possible greater profit works out for the two sites.
Anyways, Congrats to PopCuts for their Best Online Music Startup in Accelerator Competition at SXSW Interactive award!!
Okay, so this comment made me actually go and dig into the site. I think this is a perfect lesson in marketing. The front page of AmieStreet says absolutely nothing about the rewards program, it only mentions the variable pricing. Even when you click into "How it works", you have to click on "Rewards" specifically (and you can't click the big picture marked "Rewards", you have to click the small text in the sidebar), and then the description of how it works is confusing (do I have to buy a song to Rec it?).
Compare that to popcuts: on the front page, in big red letters "Buy a song. Get paid everytime it sells again."
Anyways, even now knowing how it works, I still think AmieStreet gets it wrong. The whole point of the market-based approach should be to incentivize buying in the long-term. AmieStreet only incentivizes it early, and it encodes directly in the price information about whether or not I should buy. If the price is already higher, why would I buy? I know that I'm not going to make any additional money off the song, and I feel bad because I didn't discover this music (I'm a follower, late to the party, the greatest sin of being a music tastemaker).
