by SHANE SINNOTT

I think the going rate for online music purchases—99 cents a song—is pretty annoying. Ninety-nine cents is a dumb amount of money to arrange on a credit card or PayPal account, yet it’s just enough that you’ll think about it a bit, especially if you’re buying a lot of songs. In other words, individual song pricing has done more than anything to contribute to the death of the album. Buying albums online should be like buying a monthly metro pass: you get a heavy discount compared to the yokels paying cash fares, because you are supporting the system. Really, I don’t think any album should cost more than the price of 50 per cent of the total individual songs, unless you can make a convincing argument that half the album is single-worthy.

There’s not a lot of pricing models like that out there right now, but in the meantime we have Amie Street (amiestreet.com). The site functions similarly to the other music store/social networking sites out there, with one difference: pricing for most (DRM-free) songs starts at either free or almost free (a few cents), and goes up as more people download it, to a max of 98 cents. With a focus on new and independent music, it creates a brilliant incentive to try something new—the less people have heard of it, the cheaper it is to buy. Also, recommending music to others on the site can give you free songs and account credit.

For now, the only bitch is that certain albums (and it seems rather randomly) are not available for purchase outside the US, but hopefully that will change down the road as the site grows. The inability of the music industry to create an acceptable licensing platform, even for at least North America, will be the subject of another rant.

If, on the other hand, you—quite sensibly—don’t want to fuck around with all of that, try Songza (songza.fm). It’s like a fancier version of the now defunct Seeqpod, specializing in “playable search” (also known as “instant gratification”): you’ll be listening to a song within five seconds of searching for it.