Amazon Launches Paid Streaming Music Service
The world needed another music streaming service, right? No? We have plenty already? Well, we’ve got another one now. Amazon already had its own streaming service as part of the Amazon Prime package. If you pay $99 a year for its no-shipping-fees Amazon Prime program, you get access to Prime Video and to Prime Music, which includes about two million songs. But for some extra money, Amazon users can now get access to the same overwhelming amounts of music offered by just about every streaming service.
If you’re not an Amazon Prime subscriber, you’ll have to pay the industry-standard $10 per month for Amazon Music Unlimited, as the Associated Press reports. But Prime subscribers will get the service for eight dollars a month or $80 per year. And if you’ve got one of those Echo speakers, you can get it for four dollars a month. (This seems to be the final version of the rumored five-dollar service that only works on Echo.) One of the big Amazon selling points is that you can ask Alexa, its voice-enable Siri-type program, to play playlists or “the new song” from such-and-such. You can also quote lyrics, and the app will supposedly find the song for you. An almost hilariously obnoxious new ad illustrates all those selling points:
Amazon Music Unlimited is available as of this morning.