By Cooper Short
As physical album sales decline, streaming music rises in popularity among music consumers. A majority of people use services like Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal to consume and discover music. Although having been involved in the music industry for years as well as the streaming world, Amazon is making its debut of its new and improved streaming service, Amazon Music Unlimited.
Amazon previously had a streaming service called, Prime Music, which launched two years ago, but unfortunately only featured a 2 million song catalog. Compared to other services like Spotify, which has 35 million plus songs, Amazon was lacking the luster it needed to attract customers. This new service is oriented directly towards its Echo smart speaker and the personal assistant named, “Alexa,” which powers the speaker. They’ve invested in their new service to cater to a new phase of streaming, which relies heavily on voice recognition. Users of both the Echo smart speaker and Music Unlimited can search and browse music by speaking their preferences. “Alexa can match lyric snippets to hit songs, and can pull up playlists by request based on decades, eras, moods or specific situations based on a user's listening history (Play pop music from the '80s, or Play Pearl Jam's catalog from 1991-1994),” (Rys & Flanagan, Bilboard).
The biggest struggle Amazon will face in this endeavor will be its profitability. Priced lower than the average price for Echo owners, and at the same price as Spotify for non Amazon Prime members, it is hard to tell whether or not they will be successful. In the wake of streaming services failing to turn a profit, Amazon hopes its deals with all 3 major music labels and its previous experience in the music industry will help set it apart from its competitors.
You can check out Amazon Music Unlimited here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/dmusic/promotions/AmazonMusicUnlimited