After adding a movie and series streaming service to their Prime package, Amazon is now also offering a music cloud for their Prime subscribers without additional costs.
About Amazon Prime
At the beginning there was just Amazon being one of the world’s biggest digital markets. Then they added the Prime service subscription, so people could pay a small monthly fee to get better service. Later Amazon added the option to watch movies and series via internet stream to TVs, PCs and mobile endpoints, without additional cost. Later however they increased the overall price of the Prime bundle as there was an acceptance across the user base due to a reasonable pricing. As some users cancelled their subscriptions to rival services such as Netflix and Hulu, they established a solid competition in the media streaming market with this step.
New Prime Music
If you have previously used music cloud subscription services, wherein they offer a large music collection and you can play them by only paying a flat fee every month, Prime Music is exactly what you expect it to be. The difference is only that you are already paying for the Amazon Prime package and can potentially save money if you manage to transition to their service without reprisals that would affect your entertainment lifestyle.
Next to the “Prime Stations” that resemble radio stations, they offer you not only a variety of albums but they also prepared fully fledged playlists for you to match all possible occasions. If you don’t want to or can’t use Internet streams all the time on mobile devices, you are also able to download the music to your smartphone, tablet, PC or Mac.
What’s in the Collection?
Amazon markets the service with “over a million songs…” and while it initially sounds like a lot, it really isn’t. As far as I could tell they focus heavily on covering modern pop music and making sure oldies are available as well. Looking up non-pop songs I found that approximately 2 out of 3 were not included in the Prime Music offering. If you are not yet an Amazon Prime subscriber you should check into their offering and see if it matches your styles, before buying into the service.
Prediction and Assumptions
At the moment it is not clear if Amazon is going to increase the costs for the overall Prime bundle again or not in the future. They also marketed the Prime Video addition as free add-on, that later became part of the pricing. Further it is possible that Amazon is going to further in-cooperate their Echo speaker device more into their Prime Music service.
If you are already an Amazon Prime user, why not try out Prime Music as well? Maybe they have the artists you like or you can save costs anyhow. Checking it out won’t hurt. If you are not yet a subscriber, Amazon offers a 30-day trial phase to check on all the Amazon Prime services.
Photo credit: Lorri Lang / Stock Snap
