Three Brown University graduates, Elliott Breece, Josh Boltuch and Elias Roman, all 22 years old, founded AmieStreet in July 2006. AmieStreet, an online music retail site for independent content, uses a unique rating system where all songs are available for free at first. Then, depending on the popularity in the market, a song’s price is driven up. According to AmieStreet’s website:

Amie Street is the most fun way to discover and buy music online because we have a social network that facilitates music discovery and because we price music right - all songs start free and rise in price the more they are purchased. Our dynamic prices allow fans to buy music without breaking the bank and they serve as a useful tool for finding great music.

We know music is social, and finding new music needs to be fun. Music discovery is best served by communication between people, so we reward fans when they recommend songs to their friends by giving them credit to buy more music. Whether you spend two minutes or two hours on Amie Street you are connected to a world of music lovers discovering new music together.

We support our artists by giving them 70% of song sales and never taking ownership of their creative work. We want all artists on Amie Street to be successful and we believe that our unique marketplace will accomplish this goal to a degree never achieved before.

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Leslie Meritt Hall (born November 15, 1981 in Ames, Iowa) is a rap artist and front-woman for the band Leslie and the Ly’s and the operator of what is best described as a “gem sweater museum”.

Hall first began displaying herself in “strangely glamorous and unflattering ways” while attending Ames High School in Iowa. During her senior year, she entered the homecoming parade, as part of a prom queen campaign, donning a sparkling pink Goodwill gown, a neck brace, and a tiara (won by her mother who was crowned Miss Aurburn, Nebraska in 1970). Her publicity stunt made the front page of the local newspaper the following day. Her campaign was a success, and when springtime came, she was crowned queen.

After graduating from high school, Hall moved to Boston, Massachusetts and completed her education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in May 2006. Currently she resides in Ames and lives with her parents. She began collecting gem sweaters in 2000 and has since amassed over 165 different sweaters according to her February 2006 interview with Bust magazine. Hall modeled these sweaters on the website gemsweater.com, garnering significant Internet traffic such that she was asked to appear on one of the final episodes of Unscrewed with Martin Sargent.

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Chinese Backstreet Boys refer to a Chinese duo who gained fame for their lip sync videos to songs by the Backstreet Boys and other pop stars. They are also referred to as “Back Dormitory Boys”, “Dormitory Boys”, and “Two Chinese Boys”. Their videos, captured on a low quality Web cam in their college dorm room, have been viewed by Internet users within China and around the world. Many of their videos can be seen on YouTube. The two, Wei Wei and Huang Yi Xin, were sculpture majors at the Guangzhou Arts Institute.

The Back Dorm Boys phenomenon has resulted in an Internet meme and spawned a variety of parodies and imitations, including attempts by non-speakers to lip-sync to the Chinese lyrics in their videos. They made their first video just for fun, to show to their friends. They had seen a funny 10-second lip sync video, and wanted to try creating something similar for an entire song. They completed their first video in March 2005, after much trial and error. They uploaded the finished video to the local network at their college. The other students liked it very much so that they helped to spread the videos out.

The Back Dorm Boys filmed a lip sync video, “The Perfect Day” and also released their first original single, “O Yi O Yi A”. This single was accompanied by both a professional music video and a lip sync version showing the Back Dorm Boys giving their own song their usual treatment. Read More…

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