Sony Music Entertainment's catalog is coming to indie music retail site Amie Street, in the New York-based start-up's first major label deal.
But here's the catch: Sony's catalog will not be participating in the "dynamic pricing" model that's been Amie Street's trademark--unpopular songs are the cheapest, and the price rises as a song is downloaded more. Instead, Sony songs will be available for a flat 69 cents, 99 cents, or $1.29 based on popularity.
"It wasn't a hard decision for us," Amie Street co-founder Josh Boltuch told CNET News. "This isn't affecting all the other dynamically priced music on the site." He noted that RED, the indie music distribution company owned by Sony, already offers its songs on Amie Street through the dynamic-pricing model. "Sony Music obviously has the option to experiment with dynamic pricing at their discretion," Boltuch added. "Clearly we would love to do that with them."
This isn't the first time that an indie music retailer has had to compromise to ink a major-label deal. Sony was also the first major label to bring its catalog--well, its "classic" back catalog--to subscription site eMusic. But the deal resulted in eMusic raising some of its prices in tandem.
Amie Street, which pitches itself as a way to discover as well as purchase new music, made major headlines last year when it was the only place on the Web to buy songs recorded by Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the call-girl-slash-aspiring-pop-star at the center of the Eliot Spitzer scandal.
I love a good deal, and the number of sites out there to help get special codes and links is massive and frequently packed with annoyances like pop-up ads and outdated content. To help sort through it I usually use Google, but a service called RetailMeNot seems like a worthy addition. The site's been around since last year, but has launched a new community portion of its site this morning that makes the coupon hunting experience a little more social and a lot easier to keep track of what deals are hot.
The service was created by the same folks who did BugMeNot and PDFMeNot (review) and follows a similar simplicity of letting you plug in a domain name of an online shop you're interested in like Amazon or GoDaddy to see if there are any promotional codes for discounts that might save you some cash.
With the new community additions the process goes a step further, letting other RetailMeNot users add their own coupon codes and note when they've successfully used a code to make an online purchase. Those updates, and other additions to the listings go into a central pool of updates, similar to Facebook's news feed. Ideally keeping an eye on this feed would give you the heads up on a new deal right when it's made available. It'll also try to match you up with other users based on the items you rate, similar to a service like Last.fm that matches you up with people who have similar tastes in music.
The rest of the features follow suit with any other modern day social network. Each user gets a profile and a variety of boxes to fill out to show their personality. It's the kind of thing I don't see a lot of my friends spending time or effort to engage in considering their efforts on pre-existing services. However, I really like the idea of collaborating with others to get good deals, which is something SlickDeals and FatWallet do a very good job at. If RetailMeNot could make this a good Facebook or MySpace application that does the same thing, I could see a lot of people flocking to it--myself included.
RetailMeNot lets you scour for deals. It also has a social element that lets you see deals other people are scoping out. (click to enlarge)
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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