amiestreet.com Friend or Foe?

I don’t know where to begin… Perhaps at the beginning. I was one of Amiestreet’s first clients. I heard about Amiestreet on one of the first episodes of Diggnation. So I decided to put my music up for sale on their website that featured, at the time, only unsigned independent artists. Well I tried at first to upload my music in 320kbs DVD quality format but Amiestreet informed me in the upload process that they only accepted 128kbs CD quality format. So I uploaded about thirty songs in the low quality format.

First a few things about Amiestreet and how it works… The first five dollars that your music earns through fan purchases goes to Amiestreet for supposedly a lifetime storage… then any money afterward is divided by a percentage between Amiestreet and the artist. Also Amiestreet has these things called recommendations (of which they did not have the word spelled right and I emailed them and they corrected it…they had two c‘s and only one m) Another thing about how Amiestreet works is they take dirt poor musicians and publish their music for free. So the artist has to have X amount of sales for free till their song goes up to a penny. And then so many sales at a penny till it goes up to two pennies and so on… So as you see paying for a five dollar storage fee can take a long time. In the five plus years my music has been on Amiestreet I have barely paid off the storage fees on some fifty odd songs. Does that even begin to resemble a no win situation from the get go? Also these recommendations called RECS for short on Amiestreet is where if people believe your song has potential the first one who recommends it $1.00 per recommendation gets in on the bottom rung of being to reap a percentage of the profits over time of the song. So if someone wants to leave a comment and say, “nice song” they have to pay a dollar… Oh it gets even better. On top of that Amiestreet on the select few they deem worthy they send them a contract stating they will actively try and market them at the cost of other artists.

At first everything was going fine. I wrote them an email once and asked them why so many other artists were being featured and I was not. They wrote back calling me a “power user” of their website (because I was on it nearly everyday learning the ins and outs and trying to make a name for myself) and said my artist name was a buzz word among their technicians in the office. Buy they regretted to inform me since my music has so many listens from the get go that if they featured me they would upset other musicians who has very few listens. That was the first line of bull and I bought it being trusting and such.

I finally came to the conclusion that with a name like RexRed that the only way people would find me stuck at the bottom of the Amiestreet roster would be if someone actually misspelled the word “retired” or just out of the blue said I wonder if there is an artist someone in the world that has named themselves RexRed and they punched RexRed into the search and do you think my music store would come up? WELL NO, SURPRISE SURPRISE? My user page would come up not my artist store. In other words the fans could network but artists could not, does that even sound right? My user page showed all the Amiestreet artists that I had favored in a futile attempt to get Amiestreet artists to add me to their own favorites. No none was friendly on Amiestreet so that attempt fell flat on its face. So I ended up with a user page profile that had links to all of Amiestreet’s unfriendly artists who did not bother to return the favor and favorite my music as a friendly gesture in return. I emailed Amiestreet back in frustration and said when people search for my music on your network they get this RexRed user page that I don’t even want instead of my music store.. But them not finding me certainly helped Amiestreet’s bottom line of favoriting the artists they than had contracted out because they were supposedly less popular than me. (cynical)

Amiestreet ignored my request to take down my user profile and continued to leave the confusion which only impeded my sales even more. This gets even better, read on…

So I realized that the only way I would get people to even listen to my music was if I were to lead them to Amiestreet myself. It turned out I was exceptionally good at leading people to Amiestreet. Why few only bought my music when it was pennies is something to ask the Amiestreet sales dept.. They handle the customer and the bait and switch policies they employ when a customer intends to buy my music there, not me. So it turned out I was able to get sixty thousand listens. That is more than Bob Dylan, (yes THE Bob Dyaln) Gillian Walsh or Lisa Lobe, had for listens on Amiestreet. I busted my butt to get those people to come to Amiestreet and put up with Amiestreet’s dual pages distraction to get them to finally give my music a listen. Incidentally Bob Dylan’s music did not start off free and work its way up to 99 cents. I guess if you are already a millionaire Amiestreet starts your music off at 99 cents. I wrote Amiestreet about raising my music to 99 cents and they ignored my letters, they did not even reply…

I know these 60,000 unique listens were people I had brought to Amiestreet for they certainly did not stumble across my music store considering I was never featured once. That was the thanks they gave me for leading people to their site… I mentioned that to them in emails and not even a reply or a thanks… So perhaps they won’t mind me making my claims public…

Well one day I noticed Amiestreet put an advertisement on my music store page titled “similar artists“. At first I figured it was based upon similar genres. But when I followed the links to the other artists pages I thought one would find my store advertised there, but nope…

I wrote Amiestreet about this and said, “These artists are similar to me but I am not similar to them?” Amiestreet did not even respond back… They had me already leading thousands of unique visitors to their pages they had a captive audience in me. Then Amiestreet put a blurb next to the songs bitrate. I was forced to upload my songs in 128bps they said 128bps poor quality 320bps excellent! I wrote Amiestreet and asked them if they would create a user based song replacer. They are my songs aren’t they? Well I had fifty some songs and most of them were about to roll over and finish paying the five dollar lifetime storage fee and they had just put a notice on my page telling listeners they were all less than desirable quality. I figured if I could just replace those with a higher quality song bitrate then I would not have to start over at zero. At first Amiestreet agreed to add the song replacer then they decided against it. They would prefer that I just upload higher quality mixes and start them over at zero and then the make another five dollars each bating me along a few more years while they bathed in the visitors I was bringing to their site.

So I released my latest album of all mostly new original songs titled The Cult Of Zero… I am sure Amiestreet knew it was a dig directed at them Considering in 5 years they had paid out roughly 13 dollars revenue to me. The rest they took for the lifetime storage… There was a small space where the artist could say a blurb about a song they had published. One day I wrote a blurb about a song saying I was a homosexual.. Within days this little blurb area was taken down and no more blurbs were allowed. I guess they didn’t like the fact that I was gay.. I was no longer allowed to comment about my own music…

One day I got a contract sent to me from Amiestreet I read it with disbelief. Then I noticed it was to a young girl, Then got an email saying they had sent it to the wrong person. OOOOOOPPPPPPPPSSSS… Excuse me…

The said they would feature me soon but never did..

Then, and this next thing was really the last straw… Amiestreet instructed their programmers to develop a nagging irritating little popup. Many of my songs I released as singles. Each time my song would finish playing an annoying popup would come up and plug their SUGGESTED ARTISTS… This would lead my fans away to their contracted artists. You know the ones who are similar to me but I am not similar to them?

Recently I just had had enough and I wrote Amiestreet in a tirade and said please take down my music! I was not nice at all about it and I said I would write a blurb about my bad experience with their site on my blogs. This blog here I have only a few readers where I have other sites where I have thousands of fans… They should be thankful I don’t post this there… Although I will be putting there name “Amiestreet” in the tags so Google will display this blog next to their, err, site link… A few days later my music was taken down… Gone forever now there is no record of me ever being there and Bob Dylan and others don’t have to question why my songs had thousands more listens than theirs…

I could go on even more about shoddy way I was treated by Amiestreet but I have wasted enough of my breath on that terrible site.

I have found another site that lets me charge what I want for MY MUSIC, they let me upload songs in whatever bitrate I want and there is not one single advertisement for another band anywhere to be found on my page and I only have one page, my artist store…

I am not going to plug a link to my music as of yet here in this blog. I don’t need Amiestreet to stroke my ego I know my music is fine. Though I am not a young school girl I am gay man and I probably would have rejected any contract they would have tried to offer me anyway. The couldn’t afford my price…

I am also not yet going to name here in this initial writing in this thread the new site that I am publishing my music at. YET, that is… This blog is to make other independent artists aware of the way Amiestreet treats their artists so Amiestreet can stroke their own bottom line… I just know that I am hightailing it as far away from Amiestreet as these four wheels can take me from that place… And another consolation that Amiestreet only had my music in a low grade song format and I only released 50 of my songs there and that is only one third of my music. Had I been able to resolve these simple conflicts with Amiestreet I might have released more and stayed. Well why does this even matter? Well it was five years of my life TOTALLY WASTED! If I can spare an artist just starting out the agony of the litter filled Amiestreet bait and switch routine well it is worth the time writing this for THEM…

Maybe in future comments on this page I will detail some alternatives to Amiestreet that I HIGHLY reccomend (SP) and link to the music of mine that Amiestreet thought was too bad to even give notice to it.

Amiestreet is still using my name to sell music…

If you type RexRed into their site (a now well known name) this comes up…

“Oops! Page not found
Sorry, but we couldn't seem to find what you were looking for. It could be that the link you clicked was bad or we no longer have what you were looking for.”

“Good news!

Even our error pages help you discover cool new music…”

YAY! More "similar artists"! NOT...

So you decide Amiestreet (place for independent music artists), friend or foe?