Amazon today announced that it has added a music streaming service to its popular Amazon Prime subcriber program. Provided at no additional cost to Prime subscribers Prime Music is an unlimited, ad-free music service with over a million songs. It includes personalized recommendations to make it easier to discover new music, hundreds of expert-programmed Prime Playlists, the ability to create your own playlists and the ability to download songs and playlists for offline playback on mobile devices.
“When Prime launched nine years ago, the program offered Free Two-Day Shipping on one million items. Today, that selection has grown to over 20 million items. Prime Instant Video now offers unlimited streaming of more than 40,000 movies and TV episodes, up from 5,000 at launch three years ago. And the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library now features more than half a million books to borrow for free,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. “Today we’re introducing Prime Music—more than a million songs from some of music’s best artists, plus hundreds of expert-programmed Prime Playlists, all at no additional cost. Prime Music is the latest great addition for Prime members and we think they’re going to love it.”
The new service will replace Amazon’s current Amazon MP3 and Cloud Play services. While free as part of Amazon Prime, it is not without its limitations. Missing from Amazon’s music catalog is Universal Music (No U2, Bastille, Nirvana and more). It also does not offer new releases, suggesting that some kind of time restriction is in effect. More music is promised so those limitations may go away in time.
With Amazon widely expected to unveil its first smartphone later this month, the company is clearly aiming to have an all-encompassing service that it can offer its customers.
Prime Music works on a variety of devices including Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD/HDX devices and both Android and iOS devices as well as PCs, Macs and any web browser. Unfortunately, it is only available in the U.S. at this point. There is no word on if and when it will come to Canada.
Source : Amazon