Amazon has stepped into the streaming music game with the official launch of Prime Music – a new service for its Prime customers offering access to over 1 million songs and hundreds of curated playlists.
The new music service is available for free for subscribers of Amazon Prime, $99-a-year membership program, which includes two-day shipping, 40,000 movies and TV episodes for video streaming, 500,000 eBooks for free, and now unlimited ad-free music streaming.
The music catalogue will have songs from artists including Britney Spears, Blake Shelton, Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen, John Mayer, and Madonna. The company has reached deals with two of the top record labels – Warner Music Group and Sony Music, as well as many other independent labels.
The world’s biggest record label Universal is notably missing, indicating that songs from artists including Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and Kanye West will not be available on Prime Music for now.
“We’re not claiming to have full coverage at this time,” said Steve Boom, Amazon’s vice president of digital music. “We don’t view this as a zero-sum game — we think people will continue to listen to multiple music services,” Boom said. “I don’t need them to stop using another service, but to also use my service.”
Boom said that Amazon’s music download store has around 30 million tracks from various artists, out of which a “substantial” portion is never downloaded.
Amazon’s Prime Music offers a number of features like ad-free unlimited streaming, pre-programmed playlists and personalized recommendations. Users can download songs for free to their smartphones for offline playback.
Users can also share the music they listen to on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, similar to an option in Spotify, the leader in streaming music with more 10 million paying members.
“A lot of these services have more music than people will ever listen to,” Boom said. “People are paying for a lot of music they’re never going to listen to.”
