Roger Fingas
Putting it in more direct competition with rivals, Amazon is readying a standalone music streaming service independent of regular Prime subscriptions, a report claimed on Friday.
Amazon is still finalizing content licenses for the service, which is anticipated to cost $9.99 per month like Spotify or Apple Music, Reuters sources said. A launch is expected in late summer or early fall.
Although Amazon already offers on-demand streaming via Prime Music, that service has small catalog of somewhere over a million songs — in comparison, its rivals have about 30 times that amount. A Prime subscription is also $10.99 per month, unless people make a year-long commitment for $99. Both tiers do come with extra benefits like streaming video and free two-day shipping on Amazon products.
Amazon is said to be interested in growing the popularity of the Echo, which has been a major hit and doubles as both a virtual assistant and a speaker. While it already supports a variety of music services — like Pandora, Spotify, TuneIn, and of course Prime Music — a full-scale, closely-integrated Amazon music service could boost the product further.
In theory the new service could take a route similar as Prime Video, which recently became available in a scaled-back Prime tier costing $8.99 per month.
Next week Apple is expected to revamp Apple Music by improving its interface and expanding Beats radio. Reports have hinted that the company is developing its own Echo-like device, though the product is unlikely to see public release in the near future.
Charles Martin
Malcolm Owen
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
Wesley Hilliard
Andrew Orr
4 Comments
no interest. no comments.
How to generate profit is a huge problem at Amazon, given its stratospheric stock valuation with little profit to show.
So Amazon is doing the copycat thing by trying its hand at streaming music. After all, it has all that server space to use for such things.
The only and big problem is how to make any money in the music business.
Even Samsung found it tough to do.
When Pandora stops playing the music I like, maybe I'll consider one of the pay ones. Until then, none of these for pay streaming services have any value to me at all.
Makes sense. But I already have most of the music I want. The rest I'll buy eventually. I guess when they stop selling downloads I'll become another record store rat, buying music for cheap off of others idiocy. Why would I pay $10mo for something I can get for paying $10 once? I can't figure it out. I get that you can listen to virtually anything, but I wonder how many people truly do that. I guess enough that it's worth it to these companies to go this route.