Starting today, Amazon Music Unlimited is the newest entry into the streaming landscape. Poised to compete directly with services like Spotify and Apple Music, Amazon has made the leap into an already cluttered space after witnessing streaming’s growth of 59% since last year. However, they’ve got a couple tricks to stand out from the competition.
Amazon Prime already offers free music for its members, but that library maxes out at about two million songs, while the new offering reaches well into the tens of millions. And since the main differences between streaming services are exclusive deals and the user interface, Amazon has a key differentiator that they think will sway potential users: Alexa voice control. Using any Alexa enabled device, users can simply speak to the service and ask to hear the “new” song by an artist, or a playlist of 90s alternative.
The payment plan begins at $10/month for non-Prime members, only $8/month for Prime users, and if you already own Amazon’s Echo smart speaker, that price gets squashed to just $4 per month for a single device.
Amazon’s Vice President of Digital Music, Steve Boom, says to “Think of this as two different levels: Prime is now the introductory service and Unlimited is the full service.”
H/T US News