Amazon Prime Music launches

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Amazon PrimePrime Music will provide ad-free, on-demand streaming to 1M+ songs to Amazon’s Prime subs. Mobile streaming is included, as is an offline download option. The subscription-based service will compete with similar music services like Spotify and Apple’s Beats.


As expected, popular Universal Music acts aren’t included, and neither are most current hits from other labels. TechCrunch observes only 1 of the top-10 songs in the Billboard Hot 100 is available.

In terms of size, Amazon’s catalog is roughly on par with Pandora’s, but much smaller than Spotify’s 20M+. Amazon’s primary goal, of course, is to keep its Prime sub base (reportedly now above 20M) happy, and to give others a fresh incentive to sign up for the $99/year service, noted a Seeking Alpha post.

Said Jeff Bezos, Amazon Founder & CEO:

Dear Customers,

A little more than 3 years ago we launched Prime Instant Video, adding unlimited streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows to the existing Prime benefit of Free Two-Day Shipping. It has turned out to be one of the most important things we’ve done for Amazon Prime members. Today, we are doing it again for music — introducing Prime Music, the newest benefit of Prime membership.

With Prime Music, you can listen ad-free to over a million songs and hundreds of expert-programmed Prime Playlists. Prime Music includes tens of thousands of albums from top artists like Daft Punk, P!nk, Bruno Mars, Blake Shelton, The Lumineers, Bruce Springsteen and Madonna. And we’ll be adding more music all the time. Here’s a list of popular artists in Prime Music.

In designing Prime Music, we wanted to remove the barriers between you and the music you love. We removed cost. You can listen to the entire Prime Music catalog for free — it’s included in your Prime membership. We removed interruptions. Don’t worry about having your music constantly disrupted by ads… you won’t hear any. We removed listening restrictions. Choose exactly what song to listen to, repeat your favorite song over and over again, or download music to your phone or tablet to listen offline.

Finally, we removed one more barrier — deciding what to listen to. Just play any of the hundreds of Prime Playlists our music experts have created for you. Check out the Prime Playlists here.

Prime members in the US can start listening to Prime Music today at www.primemusic.com. Kindle Fire HD/HDX devices will get Prime Music in an automatic, over-the-air update. You can also download the latest Amazon Music app in the Android and iOS appstores. If you’re not yet a Prime member, start a 30-day free trial today. We think you’ll find the convenience of free two-day shipping combined with access to a huge selection of movies, TV, music and books to be an incredible value for just $99 a year.
Prime Music

Happy listening (and watching, and reading, and shopping),

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO