Amazon's music subscribers doubled in the last six months

Good news for Amazon.

The last public estimate of Amazon’s music subscribers was 16 million in October 2018 (the stat covered both its basic-tier Prime Music service and its full Amazon Music Unlimited). Now, music boss Steve Boom, talking to Billboard, claimed that Amazon now has “tens of millions” of paid music subscribers, and that it has doubled the number of Music Unlimited subscribers in the last six months.

Actually this doesn’t mean there are now 32 million of subscribers, since the 16 million figure covered both tiers of Amazon’s music-streaming offering. But it's a great result.

In the same interview, Boom also talked about the impact of Amazon’s Echo smart speakers:

There's been a lot written about streaming and about smart speakers, but [articles] still talk about it as if this is some future state. We know better than that: it's actually happening right now. We wouldn't have grown to this scale if it hadn't been happening already… Not everybody wants to listen to music on a smartphone, it turns out.

Boom also explained that Amazon isn’t cannibalising the likes of Spotify and Apple Music:

We have a lot of evidence that the customers that we're bringing into our ecosystem are either new to streaming in the first place, or new to premium streaming.