Amazon Prime Music & Shopping: Company to Introduce Music Streaming for Subscription Members; Offline Listening Included
Amazon added another benefit for its yearly subscription members. On Thursday, the company debuted Prime Music, a streaming music service that boasts over one million songs.
The service will be unlimited and ad-free, something competitors Pandora and iHeartRadio don't offer on their free services. Pandora has 76 million listeners, while Spotify, which offers ad-free music for a fee, has 10 million paid members. Amazon doesn't advertise how many paid Prime members it has, but has said in the past it has "tens of millions of Prime members."
Amazon Prime is a paid, yearly service for frequent Amazon shoppers. It allows customers to receive free 2-day shipping with no minimums, streaming video and now, streaming audio. Customers pay $99 per year for these benefits. That price was recently raised from the old price point of $79.
Prime Music users will be able to import their songs from their pre-existing playlists or create their own if they wish from the huge library that Amazon offers. Like Pandora, Prime Music will have theme-based playlists based on artists or genres. Prime Music will be able to make suggestions on music based on your listening history.
Probably the best feature will be the ability to download the songs for offline playing on mobile devices.
There's no social or sharing feature on Prime Music yet. But, that feature could be added.
Spotify does offer more music, a library of 20 million songs, however, the price point is higher, $9.99 a month and it doesn't come with the additional features, like videos, free shipping and e-book offerings, that Prime does.
By monthly costs, Amazon Prime comes in at $8.25 per month. For now, there's less music than Spotify and Pandora, but users will enjoy the other benefits, and for a better value.
What do you think about the new Amazon Prime Music service? Are you a Prime member? Will you switch from Spotify or Pandora to this new service? Leave a comment below.
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