News - 12/06/2014

Amazon launches “Prime Music” with over a million tracks

Amazon launches “Prime Music” with over a million tracks


Last night’s rumours were correct and Amazon has just released its much-rumoured Prime Music service in the United States.

Amazon Prime members will be able to access a catalogue of over a million songs and hundreds of playlists, a much smaller pool of music than that offered by competitors like Spotify and Beats Music, but let’s not forget that this time the offering is seemingly free as it’s part of the prime membership ($99 per year).

So what music can we expect to see on the service?

According to last week’s reports Amazon Prime will not include recent releases (up to 6 months old) and that seems to be confirmed by a quick search for new offerings by the likes of the Roots, Afrojack, Tori Amos and Pharrell - which are all missing.

The Popular Prime Albums section though showcases that there are some very popular albums on the service including “Random Access Memories” by Daft Punk, “The Heist” by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, “Unorthodox Jukebox” by Bruno Mars and many more.

There are some big gaps as well, none of Radiohead’s albums are available, also Muse, Imagine Dragons, Amy Winehouse are nowhere to be seen. There are however hundreds of Karaoke and cover versions which pop up when you search for those artists which makes for a confusing consumer experience. It’s notable that instead of working in a similar fashion to the Prime Instant Video service, which tells users that a certain TV series or movie is not available recommending them to check out an alternative movie or TV series, Prime Music does present them with other versions of tracks which are nowhere near the quality of the real thing.

Users are able to add music available on Prime to their own music library on the Amazon Cloud Player, which also includes all the music that was uploaded by the user or added as part of the Auto Rip program.

It’s unclear right now what kind of impact Amazon Prime Music could have on the market, what’s clear is that Amazon is willing to invest in the service and work out how that will fit into its ecosystem, including the Kindle Fire and also the Fire TV device that was introduced earlier this year.

(Andrea Leonelli)

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