Amazon has finally announced their new music streaming service, named Prime Music. This will be a consolidation of Amazon MP3, Cloud Player and the new streaming service, all brought into the Prime Music platform, available for free to all Amazon Prime customers.
This is essentially only for Amazon Prime users, currently there is no way for someone to simply pick up Prime Music on its own. The launch will include “over one million songs” from different genres and decades and the app will be available where Amazon’s Music has always been.
The $99 Prime package now includes free shipping on selected products in the Amazon store, Amazon Instant Video, Kindle e-Books lending and Prime Music service. This is a pretty good deal for the customer, considering the original package only had delivery and cost $79 a year.
Going into the Amazon Music Library, songs available to stream will be marked with the Prime logo. The one million songs might seem like a lot and might be all that some listeners need, but for avid music fans Amazon has still not made a deal with Universal Music Group, the biggest music company in the world.
This is a huge step back from other music streaming services like Spotify, Beats Music and Pandora who have worked with Universal for a few years and made sure the relationship between the creators and the streaming service is good, even if it means hacking at their profits for a year to keep the singers signed on.
Jay-Z, Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Snoop Dogg, U2 and even Elvis Presley’s songs are signed to the Universal Music Group brand. For casual listeners this might not mean much, but we are sure the average fan will run into songs that are unavailable to stream and become annoyed at the service.
That being said, Amazon doesn’t seem too worried, they have already made sure to keep six months distance between a single or album being released before picking it up on Prime Music and also want to keep users paying $0.99 for a track if they cannot get it on Prime Music.
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