I've been following AmieStreet for somewhere between a year or two, I'd guess. It's a new music distribution model to compete with iTunes and eMusic, and the model itself is very intriguing but it has generally been sorely lacking on quality content. (Granted, this also allowed some great indie no-names to rise to the top). The model is market-based: all music starts off as free downloads and then rises in price based on demand. The more downloads, the higher the price goes, up to a cap of 98 cents. There's also a recommendation system that is designed on a system almost like a stock market, where you can recommend a song when it's cheap and if it goes up in price, you can "cash out" and get money in your account for other music. The third tier is a "Fantasy Record Label" on Facebook, where you can pick five songs you want in your label and as they go up in value, you collect points which you can cash out at the end of the month (again, for music on AmieStreet). I heard that late last year they got major funding invested in the site, and today is a major growth day: "We've just added over 15,000 songs from the gold-mine catalogs of Beggars, Polyvinyl, and Matador..." and many of them are still free downloads as of this writing! Click below for more details and links.

Good 50x70 has a call out for entries:

If you ask most people, they’ll say that  advertising, and the communications  industry as a whole, sells people things  they don’t need and can’t afford.  It might be occasionally entertaining,  but by and large it’s fundamentally  wrong and unnecessary. 

As we work in it, we’d prefer to focus  on the positive side.  The communications industry is also  the best in the world at grabbing  people’s attention and getting them  to act on what we say.  The aim of Good 50x70 is to use these  skills to highlight more important things  than beer and trainers.  It’s a competition to raise awareness  amongst the creative community of the  power we have to be a force for good. 

There are 7 briefs from 7 charities  on 7 issues that affect thousands  of people around the world.  All you have to do is pick a topic that  inspires you and submit a poster on that  theme. 210 posters (30 from each brief)  will be selected by our jury of leading  designers and exhibited around  the world and published in a catalogue,  but more importantly they’ll be  presented to the charities for theiuse as a potential campaign.   

Click below for more info and some sample entries from last year 

George W. Bush famously asked USians to go shopping after 9/11 to battle the terrorists by fortifying the economy in the wake of the attacks...a strategy that was not original in concept but was startling in its context. The same strategy is visible again in all the latest talk of stimulus packages. As my brother sent in an email a few weeks ago: "I'm sure all of you living in the USA have heard the discussions about an 'economic stimulus package' to 'get the economy going.' It seems like such a strange concept to me: the government will likely borrow a huge pile of money, distribute it around for people to spend as quickly as possible, and thus save us from recession. The economy is so weird and scary... and unconcerned with values." I was interested to come across a campaign from the Simple Living Network: "Don't Buy It." ("Thanks for the gift Federal Government, but you are missing the point!" they say. "The United States cannot spend its way out of its financial difficulties. We do not need a short-term solution for long-term problems. We need fundamental, far-reaching change to a broken and corrupt system.") Click below for more on their campaign.

Granted, it's kind of a tabloid stunt to immediately mention that a man eats roadkill when he may intend his broader message to be about sustainability and the distance between us and our food, but I'm going to do it anyway. I came across a few links about urban foraging with a twist. Urban foraging includes things like collecting edible vegetables, plants, and herbs from vegetation that is growing around the city, in parks and so on...but for non-vegetarians, where's the meat? (Obviously, my answer to that question would be: in the dumpster. We get more meat than we can deal with so we often distribute more of it to friends than we keep ourselves). The articles offered another take on the location of the meat: dead on the road or living in the pond, in the park, in the garbage in the back alley... (The roadkill article is cleverly titled "The 100 Mile-an-hour Diet").