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Amazon’s Prime Music streaming service goes live with over a million songs, has an iOS app

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After months of negotiations between Amazon and the record labels, Amazon Prime Music, the Kindle maker’s streaming music service, has just gone live on the web. The service, Amazon says, has “over a million songs and hundreds of playlists. The service is exclusive to Amazon Prime members, but you can start listening now with a 30 day free trial. The service is unlimited and ad-free, unlike Apple’s iTunes Radio but like Beats Music, but the promised mobile apps for tablets and phones do not yet seem to be available. That may be because the official launch of Prime Music is only expected to occur tomorrow…

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The service heavily revolves around playlists as opposed to searching for individual song titles (as seen in the image above). Here’s what a playlist looks like:

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Prime Music also has unlimited Offline Playback:

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The mobile apps will work across both iOS and Android. On June 18th, Amazon is holding an event to announce a phone with a 3D/parallax display feature.

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Comments

  1. Daniel L. Lau - 10 years ago

    I hate to say it as a Mac fan, but Apple is so slow to introduce these kinds of services into iTunes that I suspect Amazon is going to eat Apple’s lunch. And what’s going on with Hachett publishing is just the tip of the iceberg. Once Amazon grabs enough market share, they’re going to force the music publishers to likewise agree to price cuts so that Amazon could further expand their music catalog. All this when Apple could easily afford to open the entire iTunes catalog to a free subscription model that they could couple with new iDevices for a one to two year period.

  2. Mike Knopp (@mknopp) - 10 years ago

    I am confused. You state, “The service is unlimited and ad-free, unlike Apple’s iTunes Radio …” However, you have to pay a fee to access this music service (you have to be an Amazon Prime member).

    Apple’s iTunes Radio is unlimited with ads if you are not an iTunes Match member. Which means that if you don’t pay Apple anything you can still listen to unlimited music with ads. Something that isn’t offered by this Amazon service. However, if you pay the $25 annual fee, which is a fraction of what Amazon Prime cost, then you get unlimited ad-free streaming music from iTunes Radio.

    I do think that Apple didn’t think big enough with iTunes Radio, but I don’t think that this Amazon music streaming service is the one to threaten them.

    • vtcajones - 10 years ago

      Yeah, I came here to say this exact same thing. iTunes radio is ad-supported only if you don’t have iTunes match. HOWEVER, the Amazon prime service is more like spotify where you can specifically play certain songs, which is definitely a nice feature.

    • Zoctor Ziglari - 10 years ago

      Do you get an on demand stream service with iTunes Match membership?

      • OneOkami (@OneOkami) - 10 years ago

        Only on music in your iTunes library that has been uploaded to iCloud. There is nothing on demand beyond that.

      • Zoctor Ziglari - 10 years ago

        @OneOkami Oh okay. appreciate the reply.

  3. shariwin - 10 years ago

    How does one delete an album. I just signed up and along with things I do want, there is an “album” of one song that I don’t want and can’t figure out how to delete it. Thanks.