Amazon Music Unlimited doesn’t replace but complements its Amazon Prime Music, which is a much more limited streaming service.
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As if the music streaming war wasn’t already complicated-Amazon has now become a major player in the game with its new service: Amazon Music Unlimited (via the New York Times). The company also mentions that a family plan, that’ll accomodate upto six users, will be launched for $14.99 per month (or $149/year) in the coming months. It offers streaming Internet music and is a competition to other such music streaming services, such as Apple Music and Spotify as well as Google Play Music. Prime members can do so for cheaper, at just $7.99 per month. According to Amazon, the Music service you used to listen to as a Prime member only included about two million songs.
Amazon launched a full-fledged music streaming service with a minimal subscription fee of $3.99/per month for users of Amazon Echo.
The requisite slew of apps will be available (iOS, Android, Mac, PC, Amazon Fire, Sonos, and so on) for the service, which Amazon has promised to bring to the United Kingdom (plus Germany and Austria) later this year.
“Given Amazon’s massive scale, its reasonable to assume it could take [music streaming] share”, said Blackledge.
The service gives access to a catalogue of millions of songs on demand.
Currently, Spotify has 40 million paying members, while Apple Music has 17 million.
Amazon Music Unlimited is available in the United States at launch. If you just want the extra music through Echo devices, you can pay $3.99/month. We’ll have to see as Amazon promises more in future iterations. Note that the company did not list all Alexa-powered devices, such as the Fire TV. In addition, Amazon Music on Alexa also offers behind-the-scenes artist commentary, called Side-by-Sides, on select music.
Prime subscribers and Echo speaker owners can get unlimited music for under $10 a month.
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A redesigned mobile app, meanwhile, puts music discovery and playback front and center via Home (selections by Amazon Music editors), Recommended (personalized music suggestions), and Now Playing (with synchronized lyrics).
