Amazon has been considering for some time whether or not it wants to be the king of streaming worldwide. As for movies, the answer seems to come from the huge investment in the rights of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ to build ‘The Rings of Power’. As for music, his lukewarm bet with Amazon Music has now skyrocketed. The service catalog is now free for Prime users, although there is a “but”.
Amazon Music is now free if you pay Prime, but there’s a catch
Although Amazon Prime recently rose in price from 3.99 to 4.99 euros per month, and also the annual plan from 36 to 50 euros, the truth is that its perks also just increased. Before we had access to Amazon Music included to load our own songs, but the streaming of the shared music library (the complete one, we had 2 million songs included) had to pay separately. Well, that just ended. To some extent.
Amazon Music adds to the services that Amazon Prime users get. Now, having an active Prime account, we will have access to more than 100 million songs on Amazon Music without having to pay a single euro monthly. Of course, we also have access to the podcasts hosted on the platform, many of them exclusive, and we will not have a second of publicity during playbacks.
Of course, the gift is not complete. Not all paid features of Amazon Music carry over to Amazon Prime members. Amazon has decided to keep Amazon Music Unlimited at 9.99 euros with which we will obtain music in high definition, “spatial” sound and, beware of this, the possibility of playing what we want when we want. Because the free version of Amazon Music that joins Prime implies that we will have random reproduction. The service will choose which order to show us in our lists, and that can only be saved by paying.
In exchange, yes, we will have the possibility of downloading contents to listen to them offline. But within what is possible, and taking into account the number of free Spotify users who listen to their music with ads and with random playback, the arrival of this free Amazon Music (for Prime, of course) can steal quite a few users. Beware of this movement that may have been very intelligent. We will see how the platform evolves from here.