Amazon launches a free streaming music service for Prime members

Amazon has launched a streaming music service called Amazon Prime Music. The service offers access to more than a million songs and hundreds of playlists according to the company. This service is for Prime members only, but comes at no additional cost to them. This is something that’s being wrapped into the Prime service, not somethings that’s standalone. There is also no free service, you can’t just go and try it out like Spotify does for example. It is really just an additional piece of the Prime membership service that they’re offering.

What Amazon is trying to do is really give you as many reasons as they can to interact with them whether it’s through audio, video, books or others. Amazon wants to be able to bring it to you on your mobile phone, in your living room (Amazon Fire TV), and now even through music it seems. We’re all expecting the company to announce their 3D phone later this month and this new strategy seems to be somewhat related to it. Now aside from the upcoming phone, they also have a streaming mobile music service. So they go from not having either of those, to having both and bringing you hardware and popular content than mobile users are using more and more on a daily basis.

This is a standalone app that you can get on the iOS and Android. All Kindle Fire hardware will be updated with it and it’s even going to have a desktop application as well. Amazon is really trying to make this as easy to use and as universal as possible. Their videos are probably not as popular as Netflix and now their music library will most likely not be as good as Spotify’s, but the company has pursued this strategy before with all of their Prime media offerings. Instead of being a specialist in one area, they are being more general. Amazon has a pretty good selection of about a million songs right now, and the numbers are sure to grow as they continue to sign more deals.

The service is not necessarily for music lovers, it’s more generalist and a little simpler than some of the other programs. That attracts a certain type of user and gives them the advantage of doing it a lot more cheaper than Spotify or some of the other competitors. We’ll just have to wait and see how this works out for them. Stay tuned for more news and updates.