With over 70% of market share in downloadable music market, Apple's iPod and iTunes are pretty much the go-to device and service for mp3s. Sure, there are loads of other mp3 players and plenty of alternative services for the pod-haters out there, but all are running way behind the user friendly and design-forward innovators from Cupertino, California.

However, there are plenty of takers willing to challenge Apple's dominance. One the one hand, there are homespun enterprises born in student housing in Providence, Rhode Island. And on the other side of the spectrum, there are major corporate initiatives involving many many millions of dollars coming from (you guessed it) Redmond, Washington.

Upstart website Amie Street, though still in it's very nascent alpha stage, suggests a totally novel business model fusing mp3 download store and social network.

Launched by three college seniors, the site seeks to promote indie and unknown artists by allowing musicians to upload music to the site free of charge. Songs are made available for free at first, with the cost rising as downloads increase. As demand dictates, so follows the cost for end users. What's more, the site offers incentive payments to members who actively recommend music to their friends on the site.

The upsides of this model are pretty obvious, allowing for word-of-mouth to lead discovery and providing an infrastructure to incentivize exploration. However, Amie Street faces some challenges making their interface as sexy and easy to use as Apple's iTunes, not to mention that they have a long road ahead with regards to building a large enough pool of songs to attract enough users to make the community-based aspects of the site viable.

This may be the only official site for Microsoft's forthcoming Zune mp3 player, which is the software giant's gambit to unseat the iPod. While details of the device have been leaking onto the internet for a couple weeks now, with extensive coverage on gadget blogs like Gizmodo, some more scintillating rumors are just now starting to circulate.

Uber gadget blog Engadget seems to suggest not only that Zune is the name not just of a player but of a full stop downloadable media store a la iTunes, but more scintillating is the speculation that Microsoft will actually subsidize the replacement of users' iTunes libraries with Zune DRM encoded versions.

So desperate is Microsoft to unseat Apple from the top of the mp3 dungheap that they will literally buy consumers out of their reliance on the iPod/iTunes/iTunes Music Store trifecta! It's an audacious and likely enormously expensive gamble.

EMERGE is eager to see how services like Zune and Amie Street fare in the face of Apple's massive lead in terms of market share, brand recognition and consumer satisfaction.

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