Amazon launches Prime Music streaming service

In accord with recent rumors, Amazon has now launched its Prime Music streaming service. Prime Music is Amazon’s entrance into the world of music streaming, and takes the focus from the individual tracks and shifts it to curated playlists, much like Songza. However, with Amazon Music allows you to play individual tracks and albums along with playlists, something that Songza fails to offer. Prime Music is bundled in with Amazon Prime and simply adds icing to the Prime value cake.

Prime Music is ad-free and, as mentioned, comes with a $99 Prime subscription (that cost can be halved if you have a valid .edu email address). The service will replace the Amazon MP3 and Cloud Play services and comes under Amazon’s new umbrella, entitled Amazon Music. Like its competitors, Prime Music will also allow downloading tracks for offline playback.

Prime Music isn’t perfect. While Amazon boasts of over 1 million tracks to start, it’s missing the largest record label in the world, Universal. With that omission, major names such as Jay-Z and U2 are unavailable on Prime Music. The good news is that Amazon and Universal are still in talks to try and work something out. Another flaw is that new releases will be missing from Prime Music. A specific time restriction hasn’t been confirmed, but it’s said to be about 6 months before tunes hit Prime Music. While such a design won’t matter to some, it could be a major downfall for many.

Nonetheless, it should be remembered that Prime Music doesn’t cost anything on its own. It simply increases the value of becoming an Amazon Prime member, which is already a superb value. With an Amazon smartphone release imminent, it also makes sense that Amazon would launch their own music streaming service. Keeping the phone within Amazon’s web is all the better for Amazon.

The web service of Prime Music is now available, as well as the Kindle Fire versions. Later today, Prime Music will begin to replace the Amazon MP3 and Cloud Player apps for Android and iOS.

Does Prime Music appeal to you?

source: androidandme