Facebook app: Fantasy Record Label from Amie St.

For those of you who don't know about Amie Street, it's a social networking site for music, where members drive the popularity and price of songs, and if they pick a winner, are rewarded for doing so. All songs in the Amie Street digital music store start at 0¢ and rise in price up to 98¢ based on demand. It's very clever idea in the sense that it recognizes that for an unsigned or little known band, the best way to promote your music is to give it away for free -- to a point. Combine this with transparent market forces, and as the music becomes better known and more popular, nudge the price up a little until it reaches the industry standard price of just under a dollar. Brilliant.

So how would Amie Street introduce their unique service to Facebook's users? Enter "Fantasy Record Label", a Facebook "game" which operates a bit like a fantasy sports league, but where a record label replaces a sports team, and individual tracks replace players.

From Amie Street's Facebook app page:

Want to discover great new music? Using your musical tastes, we’ll find you new music you'll love. Put your new favorite tracks in Your Fantasy Label to compete against friends and earn free money to spend on new mp3 downloads.

I took the Fantasy Record Label app for a quick spin this morning, and was quite impressed. Most of all because the music I discovered through putting together my "record label", was actually really good.

How it works

It's a pretty simple process to set up your "label". First, you're required to give it a name (in my case I went with the default: Steve's record label), and next you need to pick the five tracks to fill your label with. To do this you can search by name, get genre-based recommendations or browse the staff picks. From the list of tracks that any of those methods generate, you can then listen to previews, and vote the song up or down, or, ultimately, add it to your label. Tracks then compete against each other, based on the aggregate voting across Facebook, and songs and labels are ranked accordingly. At any time, you also have the option of purchasing any of the tracks displayed.