For Spotify and Pandora Media Inc (NYSE:P) customers that enjoy around 20 million songs a few clicks away, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)’s announcement that it would begin offering a music streaming service that promises “unlimited, ad-free streaming” and “over a million songs,” hardly inspired fear into the aforementioned existing services.
Amazon Prime Music panned by critics
Critics were nearly immediately reserved about the addition and it certainly didn’t bother any of the major players in the music streaming industry. But that’s not the point. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is simply rolling out a new service that most people pay for in order to receive unlimited free two-day shipping for a year for the recently raised price of $99. For frequent online shoppers, this is nothing short of a bargain and when you bundle in a collection of e-books and video streaming it remains quite the deal.
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is simply adding content to this existing service. Music “soothes the savage soul” but Amazon Prime Music simply gives, let’s face it, the older generations an opportunity to hear some music while shopping or while already otherwise using their Kindle Fire devices.
Prime Music, in my opinion, isn’t trying to offer benefits over its competitors but it is offering a benefit to existing Prime customers, free music.
Just as Amazon Prime Instant Video can’t compete with Netflix’s catalog, it isn’t trying to at all. It’s simply giving away stuff to customers that are paying for two-day shipping for around $8 a month.
Critics have lost the plot, it’s free.
I live in Guatemala so an Amazon Prime subscription has never appealed to me and I certainly wouldn’t buy it for Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)’s original programming that I can comfortably use a torrent site to download and share with my friends. That said, my mother will be arriving for a visit in a matter of hours (Chicago to Miami flight as I write this) but as she kept me updated on the space in her bags in the last days I found myself using paid two-day shipments for individual purchases that ultimately saw me spend half the year’s subscription. Silly me, thankfully Amazon’s customer service applied these amounts to the Prime subscription I now have retrospectively.
Critics of Amazon Music Prime are just off base. It’s pretty much rubbish, but it’s not trash on your lawn it’s free music that is not particularly well curated but again, it’s FREE.
Good on you Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN). And for those that don’t listen to the Billboard 40 or 100 it actually has quite a bit of good music.
Presently, the service is available on desktop, Android and iOS.
