When Amazon Prime first came out, it was a service that offered customers cheaper or free access to options for faster shipping. As the Prime members increased, the company also began introducing new features like access to its streaming video and music services.
Amazon revealed a new perk for its Prime members that may tempt some users away from competing services like Apple Music or Spotify.
There is good news for Amazon Prime members. Amazon will now provide 100 million songs in shuffle mode to Amazon Prime subscribers. Although Amazon Prime members do not have unlimited access to music on demand, shuffle mode does provide access to the whole collection.
Users can make playlists that are customized to their individual listening preferences and the songs are ad-free. Any artist, album, or playlist can be put on shuffle. This suggests that users must repeatedly skip through a huge number of tracks before finding the ones they want.
Amazon noted that “Prime members will now be able to stream more music than ever before. We’ve expanded the Amazon Music catalog for Prime members to include more than 100 million songs—up from 2 million—entirely ad-free.
Prime members can explore music and podcasts based on their likes; shuffle play any artist, album, or playlist in the catalog; and stream a collection of All-Access playlists tailored to personalized listening preferences on demand and available to download for offline listening.”
The company revealed that it will now provide Prime members with a complete music catalog with 100 million songs, as opposed to the earlier, more constrained selection of just 2 million songs, and will make the majority of the most popular podcasts on its site available without ads.
The move is a direct jab at rivals in the streaming music industry, particularly Spotify, which has been entering the podcast sector in an effort to increase revenue. However, despite paying for the service, Spotify’s paying subscribers are growing impatient with the fact that they still have to listen to podcast advertisements.
Amazon believes that the combination of a full music catalog and the promise of ad-free podcasts from Amazon Music will make it a strong substitute. Moreover, the Amazon Music app is getting a makeover, and a new “Podcast Previews” feature will enable users to listen to brief snippets in order to find new podcasts they might enjoy.
Recently, the company announced the availability of auto-generated, synced transcripts on a few podcasts for US users. For certain Amazon Originals podcast episodes, transcripts are available.
This is an excellent move by Amazon, given both Apple and Spotify indicated that they would look into raising the prices for its streaming services.
Amazon runs the online music store and streaming service known as Amazon Music. In January 2008, it became the first music store to offer music from numerous independent artists as well as the four major record labels (EMI, Universal, Warner, and Sony BMG) without digital rights management (DRM).
I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.