Amazon, the overlord of must-have gifts and random everything else you don’t really need, today officially launched its Prime Music Streaming music service this afternoon, offering Amazon Prime users UNLIMITED, ad-free streaming on over a million songs. The service allows users to play specific curated playlists as well as the ability to add individual songs to a playlist, and offers unlimited offline playback for all songs available on the service. Though Amazon’s newly launched music catalog seems to only offer songs older than six months, a possible effort meant to save the company millions on royalty costs. In comparison, other streaming music services (like Apple’s newly acquired Beats Music, or Spotify, Pandora, iTunes Radio) all offer new releases and albums to their subscribers. Apple’s iTunes Radio also offers new releases to listeners, however the service is centered more around users discovering new music through stations as opposed to searching for individual songs.
Amazon’s Prime Music service also joins the company’s Prime Instant Video offering, which grants users access to an extensive library of current and old TV shows / movies. Amazon Prime Music is available today as a FREE service to all current Amazon Prime members, with Amazon charging $99 per year for new Prime members. Amazon also recently announced it has roughly 20 million paying Prime members.
Source: Amazon Prime Music
