Amazon Prime customers will now have access to a million tracks

Jun 12, 2014 08:50 GMT  ·  By

Not even two weeks after word leaked out that Amazon was getting ready to add a music streaming service to its Prime experience, the company has made the official announcement.

Prime Music, as it has been named, will be joining other services that Amazon already offers to customers of its Prime service, which includes a movie streaming service, free ebooks, discounts, two-day shipping and more for $99 per year.

Prime Music is to go live on Thursday and there will be some one million tracks in the catalogue, available from two of the biggest record labels in the world – Warner Music Group and Sony Music, as well as from independent labels.

Frankly, the song selection isn’t all that good. For instance, Spotify has more than 20 million tracks to offer customers, a wide enough range for everyone to find something they’ll like.

Amazon sees things a bit differently however. “A lot of these services have more music than people will ever listen to. People are paying for a lot of music they’re never going to listen to,” said Steve Boom, video president for the worldwide digital music department. This misses the point of offering people the option to actually listen to music they love, which may or may not end up being among the one million tracks available on Prime Music.

“With Prime Music, you can listen ad-free to over a million songs from top artists like Daft Punk, P!nk, Bruno Mars, Blake Shelton, The Lumineers, Bruce Springsteen and Madonna. And we’ll be adding more music all the time. Load up your library with Prime Music. Find more music from your favorite artists or let Amazon’s personalized recommendations introduce you to your next favorite band,” reads Amazon’s presentation of the new service.

The service comes pre-packed with hundreds of Prime Playlists that Amazon put together, which have been created in a Spotify-similar manner. This means that Amazon has created playlists to match the users’ activity, but has also mixed some by genre, artist and more.

Prime Music comes with no ads since users already pay for access, even if this is indirect, and no playback restrictions.

Amazon notes that it’s possible to listen to Prime Music on a range of devices such as Kindle Fire, iOS, Android, PC and Mac and that tracks can be downloaded from the catalog to mobile devices without much trouble. This is ideal for road trips when you have no Internet connection.