Great to hear about the redesign, by the way. Looking forward to seeing the result!

Actually, there where people in the audience over at Universal that had never heard of Amie Street, and when I told them about it I am sure I heard some “cool”, “interesting” and other kinds of positive whisper from the conference room.

How about that? Universal buys Amie Street? Would you sell?

FAQ and more help

Yeah definitely. This is already in the works (here’s a sneak peek http://amiestreet.com/help/faq.php). Just couldn’t get it done it time to get it in with this synch. It’ll be there soon though. Street credit is how much credit you have earned or could potentially earn for all of the recs you’ve made, the same as the amount of credit you would get by cashing out all of your recs on the site right now.

Share with a friend.

This is sort of the nuts and bolts behind the REC system. But I’m working on extending the whole sharing system, adding more sites to share on, and the share with a friend already on amie street, ie just enter a username or check boxes with everyone to share with.

Buying songs, albums, catalogs, credit, recs for a friend

Working on getting this in as well. We’re really resource constrained at the moment (hopefully not much longer) and I can’t code any more than I am right now (I’m averaging an 18-20 hour work day) . Just imagine this scenario, you have a friend that is really into funk and soul. A great funk and soul label like daptone records comes on the site with their entire catalog. You catch it just as it comes in, so the entire catalog is free, and with one click you could get that entire catalog or buy it for your friend.

More social networking features.

Yep got that one too. Hopefully soon we can introduce the personalized home section, see who’s online, browse music by tag that you’ve tagged already, constant running update with AJAX of your fan feed (new recommendations and songs from artists you re a fan of), scrobble displays (yes we do support scrobbling right now), new recommendations from friends, friend requests, all that. The PM system as well, integrated into everything. You can send messages now, but its a straight email.

UI consitency

Eliott is working on that too. Its hard to be consistent everywhere when your’re constantly tweaking and trying out new things. Ratings (for everything really) are already there. They got removed in this latest update because we really couldn’t find a way to work it into the UI. Ratings are also integrated with your friends, so say 50 people on the site have rated a songs as 3.4. What does that really mean to you? What if there were another rating display that only took into account your friends? This all was in the previous versions (and still is there on the backend). Next update hopefully we can work this back in.

Streaming songs

Yes, you can already stream full songs. From anywhere. Even if you happen to own some songs in the player on this page. You get the full song. Is the display confusing? The fact that it says SAMPLE next to the songs title? Thats just a minor output glitch between the player framework and the rest of the site, ie the XSPF playlist. In the next release, we’ll do a check it you own that songs, and to get rid of the confusion, remove the SAMPLE text from the title. And, also adding the ability to download a song or album right in the widget itself.

When streaming music right from the Recommendations list

Yep. We’re trying out this functionality on all the chart lists, so you get the full list loaded as the playlist. It’s been working out really well and people are really into it, so we’re going to go ahead and add that in to all the rec lists as well.

BTW. You say that all the music starts free, but in your blogpost announcing that Alexa Ray Joel had joined her album already cost 312¢. Did you make an exception for her or where your announcement just late, so that her music had already jumped up to that price?

ABSOLUTELY NOT! The only exceptions to the pricing algorithm are songs which fall under our benefit media project, in which all songs sales go directly to a charity or other non-profit cause. And the exception is only if the artist, the non-profit and us agree that it should stay out of the algorithm and have a consistent price or whether it should float like everything else. Otherwise, we make absolutely NO exceptions on this.

The reason is says a price other than free is that in the blog posts, we evaluate the album and get a real time price of the entire album. That one in particular went up about a week ago, and has climbed really fast. Unfortunately, in the feeds right now, this isn’t so graceful and isn’t supported, sorry. Soon it will be converted to a dynamic image so that everyone can see it.

Sheesh! That was a lot. I have a LOT of work to. Thanks again for the suggestions. Keep em coming! The site is going to be just unbelievable soon! And its all because of feedback.

And I’ve got some suggestions:

One thing I really miss is a easily accessible FAQ. Some things might not be self explaining, so it would be cool with a FAQ. I found a link to some kind of FAQ for RECs, but the page was down, and don’t ask me to find it again, because I have no idea where it was.. And what is Street cred actually?

Share song: on Facebook, by email, but why not with friend?

An option to buy a song for a friend would be nice, both songs that you’ve already bought yourself, and songs you haven’t bought.

Likewise an option to buy credit to a friend would be great.

More social features like getting noticed when someone adds you as a friend, PM (Personal messages), etc. I’d like this to “pop up” on the page you’re at at that moment, without having to reload the page, and not in a popup window (might use ajax). Maybe a list of online friends in the sidebar?

Take some inspiration from Amazon. Give me a check mark list of genres where I can choose what I like, take some statistical data, maybe even a rating system for individual tracks and whole albums, and use all that to customize what I see on the frontpage.

The UI should be more consistent. Rounded corners or not, decide one and stick to it! An example: that Share song button crashes terribly with the Buy song button. And please get rid of that Digg sidebar. I love Digg, but it feels wrong to see that on your site.

Why can I only stream samples of songs? Because if not people could streamrip them instead of buying? Well, if they don’t want to buy, they can download from P2P networks anyways, and I’m pretty sure that’s easier.. Because people might just stream all day long instead of buying? Well that way they can’t make their own playlists with music from different artists, and they can’t bring it with them, so that’s not very practical either. But if you’re afraid of that, how about a subscription service? For $1 a month or something you can stream the full songs for free, and the money gets divided among the artists based on how many times the subscriber streamed their songs. If that’s not something you want to do I’d at least appreciate it if you’d fade down the music when the sample is over

When streaming music right from the Recommendations list the music player opens with only that track in it. I think it’d been better if it opend with all the tracks in the album preloaded in the playlist.

Wow, that was a lot. I hope that didn’t come out as a rant or anything, just wanted to share my ideas on how you could improve this great service!

BTW. You say that all the music starts free, but in your blogpost announcing that Alexa Ray Joel had joined her album already cost 312¢. Did you make an exception for her or where your announcement just late, so that her music had already jumped up to that price?