Amazon Prime Music launches in UK
By James Cridland for media.info
Posted 28 July 2015, 5.59am edt
Amazon today launched Amazon Prime Music, which gives existing Amazon Prime members access to over a million streaming music tracks for no extra charge.
The service - available on the Amazon website, and iOS, Android and Kindle apps - allows Prime users to stream or download individual tracks, full albums and playlists for free.
Additionally, if you buy CDs through Amazon, many of them (marked 'AutoRip') will automatically appear in your Amazon music player too. You can also upload songs to the Amazon Music service.
The service is ad-free, and available to all customers who've signed up to Amazon Prime - which also offers free video streaming, no shipping fees, an unlimited photo service, and free books for hardware Kindle ebook devices.
In our relatively quick test of the service so far, we found an old Pet Shop Boys album that we must have purchased from Amazon in the mists of time - don't judge - and a set of recommendations of free Prime albums to listen to including Suede, The Smiths, Blur and Supergrass. The service also included around 150 'relaxed and laid-back' playlists, including "Reading on the move" (instrumentals with a gentle pulse to help you concentrate), "Coffee shop jazz" and "Acoustic hangover cure"; and a further five categories of playlists. The user experience on the web is not brilliant, though it's better on mobile.
While the catalogue is small in comparison with other services - Spotify claim they have over thirty million tracks - Amazon Prime Music is included as a free extra to the Prime service. It's £79 a year, though you can get a 30-day free trial if you want to give it a go. Students get Prime for half price, apparently.
As ever, it's another demonstration that radio stations who simply sell themselves on music are in a fast-changing environment. Many industry observers say that radio needs to sell itself on personality and storytelling, rather than merely a music mix.
"Today we’re introducing Prime Music -- more than a million songs from bestselling artists, plus hundreds of Prime Playlists hand-built by our team of music experts -- all at no additional cost. Prime Music is the latest great addition for our UK Prime members and we think they’re going to love it," said Christopher North, Managing Director at Amazon UK, speaking to Wired magazine, and we bet he really said exactly that on the phone to them as part of a normal, natural conversation.
Amazon Prime Music's app is also available on the Amazon Fire Phone. "Yay," said nobody, ever.
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