Amazon Launches Streaming Music Service; Spotify and Beats Shrug

Photos: Courtesy of Amazon

Amazon introduced a new streaming music service for its Prime members today. Amazon Music is an ad-free service that features more than one million tracks from 10,000 albums drawn from the catalogs of Sony, Warner and many independent labels (Universal Music Group’s catalog is absent, as it wasn’t part of the deal). You can listen to music online, or download them to your device for offline use. It goes live today on Kindle Fire HD and HDX, iOS, Android, PC and Mac apps, and the web. Amazon says it will be coming later this year to Sonos, Fire TV, and other platforms.

Streaming music is increasingly a commodity, with the various services trying to set themselves apart via features. Amazon says that it’s focusing on a few key areas. There will be no ads–neither audio nor graphical ads within the app. You won’t have to pay extra to listen to music offline. Nor will listeners have to suffer through tracks they don’t want to hear — you’ll be able to skip songs or reply them to your ear’s content.

There are a few nice features in the service. For example, if you’ve been buying music from Amazon since it began selling CDs in 1998, you’ll see many of those tracks and albums already populated in your library. And if there’s music from Universal you’ve previously purchased—something from Kanye West for example—it will still show up in your personal Amazon Music library even though you can’t stream other Universal tracks. If you’ve only bought a track or two from an album, the service will show you there are more free ones to be had. There are also playlists created by Amazon’s own “experts,” and Songza-style music lists meant to match your mood—for example under “Happy and Upbeat” you’ll find “Pop to make you feel better.” You can, of course, create your own playlists as well.

But really, the main feature is Prime itself. Without a deal that gives access to tracks from Universal, it would be hard to justify choosing Amazon’s streaming service over Rdio or Spotify. But given that this is yet another feature that comes with all the other benefits of Prime, and that the annual cost of a Prime membership is less than an annual subscription to Rdio, Spotify, Beats or Google All Access, it does more to help sell Prime than it does to sell itself as a standalone service. If you think of it as a music streaming service that also includes free shipping from Amazon, a robust video library, and a book lending library, it’s suddenly a very good deal–even without the songs from Universal artists. It is, very much, a way to help suck you into the Amazon ecosystem and eventually buy more stuff from Amazon.