Amazon announces new music streaming service

By Barry Eitel

SAN FRANCISCO (AA) – Amazon announced Wednesday that it was muscling into the crowded music streaming market with a service priced to undercut similar offerings from Spotify and Apple.

Music Unlimited already has a full music library of “tens of millions of songs,” the company claimed, rivaling Google Play Music, Tidal, Spotify and Apple Music.

It appears the online retailer is attempting to beat its new competitors with a strategy similar to how it shut out brick-and-mortar book retailers. Amazon Music Unlimited is priced significantly lower than other streaming options while offering essentially the same music library.

Members of Amazon Prime, the company’s subscription membership service that offers free shipping and other perks, can receive Amazon Music Unlimited for $7.99 per month. Owners of an Amazon Echo, a voice-controlled media device, can purchase the service for $3.99 per month.

The discounted price for Echo users is significantly less than on-demand offerings from Spotify or Apple Music, which each charge $9.99 per month. Customers who are not members of Amazon Prime can pay $9.99 for Amazon Music Unlimited. There is no free, advertising supported version similar to the free version of Spotify.

Alongside the inexpensive price, Amazon is boasting about the service’s artificial intelligence abilities. Paired with the Echo device, the company claims that users are able to pull up music by announcing their mood or repeating a snippet of a song’s lyrics.

“If you don’t know the name of a song but know a few lyrics, if you want to hear songs from a specific decade, or even if you’re looking for music to match your mood, just ask,” Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos said in a statement.

Now available in the United States, the company said the service would roll out in the United Kingdom, Germany and Austria by the end of the year, with more countries following soon after.

Amazon did not announce any Amazon Music Unlimited exclusives with the launch, a key tactic used by Apple Music and Tidal to shore up an audience. Tidal, for example, had early, exclusive access this year to albums released by superstar musicians like Beyonce and Drake.