Amazon's Prime Music service and its accompanying apps were released recently, after a long buildup of rumors that the company was interested in launching a Spotify-like streaming service for Amazon Prime members. Those rumors were right about the music service but wrong that it would be like Spotify. This week, we look at Amazon Music — specifically the Android app — a mobile and web music service that can truly be described as "very Amazon-y."

Amazon Music: One App for Prime Streaming, Store and Cloud Player

Amazon didn't just release an app for Prime members when it introduced Prime Music. It readjusted its entire music app strategy, pulling a reverse-Facebook and incorporating everything you'd do with Amazon relating to music into one app: Amazon Music.

Library: Easy Navigation Through All the Music You Own

So along with Prime Music, the Amazon Music app incorporates a Library with both music on your device and digital music you've purchased from Amazon or uploaded to the Amazon cloud.

Under the same roof, you have access to all the music you already had on your smartphone, along with selections from the cloud — all organized with an easy-to-toggle "cloud/device" switch in the top right corner.

If you don't often purchase music through Amazon, you still might be surprised to see some oldies — even some CDs (gasp!) you might have bought through Amazon's "AutoRip" feature — you previously picked out with your Amazon account years ago still there in the "cloud" side of the app. All the tracks you add using your Prime Account will end up there. And every piece of music you have stored locally on your device will be there in the "device" side, too.

This aspect of Amazon Music's design is pretty intuitive, and it's impressive that Amazon didn't wall-off non-Amazon collections from its app, and that Amazon Music automatically finds your device's local music files without any input required from you to set it up.

However, at least in my case, Amazon didn't recognize playlists set up in other local music player apps, and while Amazon Music's Library has everything you need for easy navigation and searching through your music collection, the lack of pre-existing playlist recognition is definitely an annoyance.

Prime Music: The Reason We're Here

Let's move on to Prime Music, the new music "streaming" service for customers with Prime memberships that Amazon recently unveiled.

Unless you use Amazon and Prime Music a lot, you'll find the home page of Prime Music features a lot of songs, artists, albums and playlists up front that you probably aren't interested in. It takes a while to for Amazon to customize its offerings for you, and in the meantime, things will be awkward.


My Prime Music "songs" selection featured four tracks from artists I've never heard of along with one song I knew about but wouldn't ever listen to, and one track put there by another Prime Music selection I only recently made for a Fourth of July party.

However, Amazon certainly knows how to make an easily navigated app, and if you've ever used Amazon Prime Video — or for that matter, any playlist-intensive media app — you'll find the Prime selection easy to browse.

Anything marked "✓Prime" is free to play, or in reality, free to preview and "Add" to your Library. This is where Prime Music's unique playlist-intensive design comes in, for better or worse.

Prime Playlists

Prime Music is probably most easily used through its Prime Playlist selection, which gives you expertly compiled lists of free-for-Prime songs that Amazon has on offer. You can browse the most popular playlists, by artist, genre or find something fitting for your mood or activity. There are a lot to choose from.

Besides being the primary way to discover new music, the Prime Playlists just makes sense if you're looking only for music that you can listen to for free with your Prime membership (more on that in a bit).

But don't think that Prime Playlists works any differently from the general "Prime Music" mode. It's not a streaming radio app. This means that if you find a Prime Playlist you like, you have to add it to your Library before you'll have access to anything but a 30-second preview.

Luckily, those songs remain in the "playlists" section of the cloud library, unless, and only until, you decide to add each song or album to your Amazon Prime Cloud Library later — saving you from the annoyance of having to navigate through lots of tunes or artists in your Library that you might have only wanted to hear that one time. It's Amazon's way of "favoriting" a song, album or artist, just like adding a playlist is Amazon's version of streaming radio.

The Downsides

So far, Amazon Music, and accessing Prime tracks, has been great. Browsing music, the app's Library organization system and the tons of curated playlists are all top notch features.

Amazon knows how to get nearly all the technical aspects right — even if it's a bit annoying that locally stored legacy playlists from other players didn't load and that you have to "Add" music or playlists and then navigate to the Library to play them, instead of the instant click-play that Slacker Radio, iTunes Radio or Spotify offer.

But the biggest downside of Amazon Prime is the mix of Amazon's spotty Prime Music offerings with the extremely "Amazon-y" way the Amazon MP3 Store is integrated within the app.

Amazon: Stop Trying to Turn Prime Music's Main Weakness into Cash

If you've heard anything about Amazon's new music service for Prime members over the past couple of weeks, you've probably heard that the world's largest online retailer couldn't reach an agreement with Universal Music Group — one of the three largest mega-labels in music.

It's a big omission, and a huge weak spot for Amazon Prime Music. It's one thing if you can't access The Beatles on Spotify. That's pretty understandable: Even popular major-market oldies stations in the last decade of radio's dominance before the Internet couldn't afford to play that content on a regular basis.

But browse through Universal Music Group's artist selection, and you'll find major contemporary artists that aren't available for free on Prime Music, including Lady Gaga, Jay Z, U2, Kanye West, Taylor Swift, J. Lo, Justin Bieber and so many more. Even if you're not a fan of pop music, the lack of UMG's content will have you noticing big omissions in your favorite genre.

And if you're a huge music fan with an in-depth knowledge of particular genres, like I am with classic jazz music, Prime Music's offerings will look so cursory compared to, for example, Spotify, as to be laughable. Prime Music only has a catalog of about a million songs right now, and Amazon says it will continue to expand that. Maybe this problem will get better with time, as it did with Apple's similarly deep tracks-lacking iTunes Radio.

But the one thing I found almost insulting about Prime Music's lack of selection was that searching for a tune or artist will — by default — bring up results from Amazon's MP3 Store if there's nothing on offer in Prime Music.

It may be a small quibble, and you can still choose to filter search results by "Prime Music only," but by making the MP3 Store's results show up by default when Prime Music can't offer anything, it almost makes it seem like Amazon is okay with having a deficient selection for Prime members because you can always just buy the album from Amazon if you really want to listen to it.

I would prefer to have the MP3 Store app better walled-off from the rest of Amazon Music's features at the start, but it's part of the company's "always-be-closing" basic DNA — so I don't ever expect to see that feature fully disentangled from the rest of the app.

Tap That App?

First off, Amazon Music is only useful as a streaming music service if you have a Prime Membership, which Amazon recently hiked from about $80 per year to $100. Without Prime, Amazon Music is just a competent music player app that also tries to sell you stuff.

Second, is Prime Music, alone, currently worth the cost of a Prime membership? No way.

However, it could be in the future, if Amazon gets enough content to make its catalog comparable to other premium music apps like Spotify (which costs a comparable amount per year).

But right now — quibbles about Amazon's "add to Library" versus one-touch streaming, its relatively tiny and spotty music catalog and the annoying MP3 Store integration aside — Amazon Prime Music gets a definite "tap that app" for people who've already paid for a membership.

Amazon keeps bolstering the "extras" for Prime members way beyond the free two-day shipping, and Prime Music is yet another example of the retail-savvy company coaxing customers to keep paying to shop, year after year.

Get Amazon Music with Prime Music for Android here and iOS here.