Amazon Prime Music Arrives!

amazon-prime-music

After months of rumor and speculation, Amazon Prime Music has arrived. And, as with other Prime benefits, the streaming service is effectively free for existing Prime members ($99/yr). At launch, Amazon’s collection pales in comparison to other streaming music services, such as Spotify. Yet, as The Verge notes, it doesn’t have to compete head-on. Prime Music is a just-nice-enough perk that it’ll surely replace my $4/mo Pandora and provides another reason to stick with Prime (despite LaserShip’s ongoing delivery challenges).

As to the service itself, it’s an interesting ad-free hybrid of albums, tracks, and playlists… with favorites ending up cross-pollinating your library of Amazon music purchases. In fact, anything tagged Prime can be downloaded for offline listening. Sadly, Amazon “Cloud Player” joins “Unbox” in the digital media dustbin as the e-tailer goes with the clear, yet dull, “Amazon Music” app branding for iOS and Android. Regarding app distribution, Fire TV support remains notably absent and my Sonos connected speaker system hasn’t yet been updated. Soon?

10 thoughts on “Amazon Prime Music Arrives!”

  1. Very cool! Yet Pandora and even Spotify have leg up with phone, car, and other device integration/apps. I can’t even get Amazon Video on my Android phone yet! Maybe Music will be more ubiquitous.

    Until they have an app for my Chumby, I’ll still be using Pandora. :-)

  2. Given how the purchased music lives with Prime stuff, Amazon could become my one-stop shop – especially on Sonos (once updated). I already have a bunch of Amazon purchases and will see about uploading my iTunes collection, dependent on bandwidth limits/charges — don’t recall what the current situation is.

  3. I actually think this is pretty awful. Amazon keeps bundling things with Prime that I would never, ever pay for on their own.

    Would love to see a Prime Lite that only includes 2 day shipping and costs less…

  4. I am intrigued by the feature that allows subscribers to download music to listen to offline. It may be time to replace my old iPod Classic.

  5. Well, I forced the update and ran it for the first time. Crash.

    Force kill. Run again. Crash.

    Reboot the phone. Run again. Crash.

    Uninstall. Download again. Finally!

    Well, no Disney soundtracks at all. Sorry, but without that my Daughter will be very unhappy with me. Didn’t expect Frozen but not even Lion King or older.

    Sorry. Nice to see my old CD purchases show up though. Wow I used to buy a lot of CDs.

  6. Amazon Prime Music seems nice, but they have a new app now. I downloaded it yesterday and I’ve tried it on two tablets and one cellphone. And it won’t switch to landsacpe mode. Which is how I mostly view these apps. So right now for me, I’m not very happy with the app since I use it daily for my personal music.

    The old Amazon Music app would switch to landscape mode. I have no idea why the new one doesn’t it. It’s especially a pain on the tablets because to listen to music in stereo the tablet is in landscape mode. But with the new app it is sideways on the screen since it stays in portrait mode.

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