Earlier today amazon quietly released long rumored streaming music service. Streaming Service Related Posts. Here comes Prime Music, a free service for Amazon Prime subscribers with over a million songs available for streaming and. The Gotchas of the Amazon Prime Music. My First Six Questions About Amazon’s New Prime Music Service. After months of rumors, Amazon has rolled out its Prime Music service. As expected, it bundles music with the company’s Amazon Prime service, which now costs $9. And as expected, there are some gotchas. Prime Music is launching with over a million songs; Spotify, by contrast, has over 2. Prime doesn’t include current hits. It also doesn’t have anything from Universal Music Group, which owns more music than anyone else. ![]() I’ve been fiddling around with the new service this morning, and it hasn’t gone that well: On my i. Pad, the new version of Amazon’s music app for i. ![]() ![]() ![]() OS is unusably slow and keeps crashing. Is a million songs a lot, or hardly any? Amazon’s own Prime Video and Netflix show us that a movie service can be a keeper even if there are far more things that it doesn’t have than ones which it does. But there does need to be a critical mass of stuff worth caring about. For me, the lack of current hits is a non- issue: Most of the music I listen to is forty, fifty, or sixty years old. Amazon launches Prime Music service for its Prime Subscribers. One thought on “ Amazon launches Prime Music. The Gotchas of the Amazon Prime Music Service.So I wondered whether the service might seem complete to me, or at least substantial. During my early rummaging around in the Prime collection, however, the pickings still come off as slim. The results for Bob Dylan look great, but much of the time, when I searched for an artist or group I got one or two major albums and a bunch of chaff such as “tributes” and karaoke versions.
I got excited about the 3. Frank Sinatra” until I saw they included one real Sinatra album (In the Wee Small Hours), three sketchy- looking compilations of his early work as a band singer, and 2. Besides albums, Prime Music offers hundreds of playlists, which seem to benefit from less restrictive licensing. For example, there are no Monkees albums, but a playlist called “The Monkees’ Top Songs” does indeed have 1. Is there a place for Amazon Prime given the profusion of free music which is already available? Amazon Prime Video and Netflix make sense in part because they’re offering content which is generally unavailable for free elsewhere (at least legally). But both Spotify and Rdio now offer free versions with way more than a million tracks. They’ve got their own catches: Spotify only lets you listen to music on mobile devices in shuffle mode, and Rdio isn’t free on mobile devices at all. But I still suspect I’d be inclined to go to a service with a far higher chance of having the music I want than Prime Music currently does. Does not having anything from Universal Music Group destroy the service, or merely cripple it? ![]() Strangely enough, most of us don’t pay close attention to which enormous corporation controls the work of our favorite performers. So it’s tough to say how much the absence of all this music will hobble Prime for any particular listener. Wikipedia has a helpful list of Universal’s artists, from A (ABBA) to Z (Zucchero). Would anyone cancel a paid account to Spotify or Rdio because this exists? Seems highly unlikely to me. Is it reasonable to say it’s FREE? Amazon is billing Prime Music as being “FREE with Amazon Prime.” I’m not sure how something that involves a $9. Especially since Amazon recently raised the price of Prime membership, which presumably makes it easier for the company to add inducements such as, um, free music. Will Prime Music get great? Right now, I can’t imagine that anyone will regard this music service as anything other than a pleasant bonus for Prime subscribers, in a category already crowded with excellent options. But Prime Video started out with only a smattering of content, and has grown into an attractive Netflix alternative. Given time, Prime Music might blossom–especially if Amazon and Universal hammer out a deal, and especially if the service expands to include at least some semi- current hits. Those are all the questions I have right now. If you have opinions on them–or on Prime Music in general–I’d love to hear them.
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September 2017
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