The interwebs have recently been ripe with rumors of Amazon gearing up to launch its own standalone music streaming service in competition with Apple, Spotify and Google. Well, the company has proven all speculations right and today announced the launch of its robust music service, called Amazon Music Unlimited.
The on-demand independent music streaming service is complimentary to the already existent Prime Music, and will cost $7.99 per month(or $79/year) for Prime users and $9.99 per month(or $99/year) for non-Prime users. The company also mentions that a family plan, that’ll accomodate upto six users, will be launched for $14.99 per month(or $149/year) in the coming months.
Amazon Prime users will now not only have access to the two million songs already available on Prime Music, but over ten million songs sourced from partnership deals with major labels including Sony, Universal, Warner and other smaller indie productions. The music service will also provide you with thousands of customized ‘functional’ playlists and personalized stations.
To make the service more relevant in this already crowded and competetive ecosystem of streaming services, the company has completely redesigned all of its apps from the ground up — to make it simpler to navigate and play music endlessly. The new Music application will be available for an array of platform including, the web, iOS, Android, desktop, Bose, Sonos, and their own Fire products.
And how can Amazon forget about its smart home speaker lineup Echo Dot or Tap, when it is music streaming that we’re taking about. The company has debuted an Echo-exclusive subscription plan, which allows you to stream tens of millions of songs by just asking Alexa to do so. You can just simply go ahead and say ‘Alexa, play the song of the day!’ or ‘Alexa, play that bang bang song by Green Day!’ and bam the speaker will start blasting off the music.
This exclusive service is one aspect of this music streaming platform that sets Amazon apart from its competitors. But, it isn’t much difficult for rivals like Google to customize its Play Music services to be compatible with the newly launched ‘Google Home’ speaker. While other competitors, Apple and Spotify are at a loss in this smart home product and service department.
The Amazon Music Unlimited service is live for users in the United States, and is expected to be extended to U.K., Germany and Austria later this year.
