How to get to Amie Street

by Cosmo Lee

Amie Street is a legal MP3 store with a unique business model. Albums start out free, and rise in price as more people buy them. The incentive is to find undervalued albums. It’s easy to set up an account, and each album has listening samples. I’ve found lots of great music here for cheap.

Recently I discovered that Amie Street sells metal. The organization is haphazard (the categories are “metal,” “metalcore,” and “death metal”); Amie Street is hardly the final word in buying metal MP3’s. But because no one knows about its metal offerings — until this post, anyway — most everything is ridiculously undervalued.

For example, as of the time of this writing (Friday morning), Jesu’s albums are all less than $4. Devin Townsend has two albums below $3. All of Sunn O)))’s albums cost less than $2.50. Vreid’s Milorg is less than $2. And so on. These numbers will disappear as people (perhaps you guys) wise up to these offerings.

I’ve separated out Amie Street’s metal offerings by label below. Go to town. If you don’t know where to start, I suggest Metalhit.com, a distro in and of itself (whose own site sells MP3 albums for $5.25 each). Evidently Metalhit.com has licensed out its entire catalog to Amie Street. I believe it has a similar arrangement with eMusic. This is the future of distros: swapping MP3’s instead of CD’s.

The End
Facedown
Flingco Sound
Housecore
Hydra Head
Ibex Moon
Indie
Inside Out
Ipecac
Mascot
Megaforce
Metal Blade
Metalhit.com
Nuclear Blast
Pathos Productions
Prosthetic
Rotten
Southern Lord
Steamhammer
Translation Loss
Tribunal