Amazon close to launching an on-demand music service as part of Prime

Amazon close to launching an on-demand music service as part of Prime


It’s not every day that a major news in the digital music space is broken by Buzzfeed, but according to a report released yesterday by the site Amazon is close to expanding the benefits of its Prime membership to an on-demand music streaming service.

The service would behave similarly to Netflix and Amazon Instant in that it would not allow users to access the very latest tracks and would only carry music that has been out for at least six months - presumably Amazon managed to get a discount on the streaming rates because of this restriction.

The article goes on to state that Amazon has reached deals with Warner and Sony and made some strides with indies but the status of its relationship with Universal is not yet confirmed.

The company’s move would make for an interesting halfway approach where consumers would be pushed towards buying a release if it’s recent and to listen to it for free if it has been out for some time. It remains to be seen what kind of per-stream rates Amazon has managed to negotiate: artists are not likely to be too happy about receiving less money just because their release is a few months’ old.

The company has recently increased the price of Amazon Prime to $99 in the US which includes free 2-day shipping, Amazon Instant video access and access to a Kindle lending library. The music service could be an appealing addition for consumers that are not too hung-up on hearing the very latest tracks.

The big question mark is figuring out who this consumers are, since on Spotify a large proportion of streams is for tracks that have been released in the past 6 months - you just have to take a look at the company’s internal charts - and Spotify is free to access. The differentiator could be mobile, if Amazon has managed to convince labels to allow consumers to cache tracks to their own devices at no added cost.

Can windowing in music work in the same way as it does with video content? We'll have to wait to find out.

(Andrea Leonelli)