Amazon Music: A Fall 2022 FAQ
The recent updates to Amazon Music raise a lot of questions. Here's some answers to help you decide whether the service is worth trying.
What is Amazon Music?
Amazon Music is Amazon’s subscription service for streaming music and podcasts to your browser, smartphone, speaker, and other devices. It competes with Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, and other audio streamers. Amazon offers two tiers: Amazon Music Prime (free for Amazon Prime subscribers) and Amazon Music Unlimited ($8.99 for Amazon Prime subscribers, $9.99 otherwise).
What just changed with Amazon Music Prime?
Amazon has long made an Amazon Music Prime tier available free for Prime subscribers. On Nov. 1, Amazon made three big upgrades to the Prime tier: (1) bumping up the catalog from 2 million tracks to 90 million tracks, (2) making music streaming completely ad-free, and (3) making many popular podcasts like the New York Times’ The Daily, NPR’s Up First, and Amazon’s own Smartless available ad-free.
Are there any other changes to Amazon Music Prime?
Yes, Amazon also made several restricting changes to the Prime tier: (1) limiting albums and playlists to shuffle play, (2) no longer allowing listeners to play a specific track, (3) no longer allowing downloads for offline play, and (4) limiting listeners to six skipped tracked per hour. Some people are pissed, but I think the complaints are niche.
Why did Amazon revamp Amazon Prime Music?
As longtime Amazon Music VP Steve Boom explained on The Verge’s Decoder podcast, the change was about broadening the music catalog that’s available to Prime subscribers and making the necessary tradeoffs to deliver that:
Prime has this massive membership base around the world, and it has been a great revenue and growth engine for Amazon Music and our partners. When we launched it in 2014, streaming was new and people’s expectations were different. Now, streaming is no longer new and people’s expectations are that they should get access to everything. We live in the kind of world where I have access to everything whenever I want it.
It was just going to the labels and explaining, “Look, this is our vision for the product going forward. We want you guys to support it.” We talk through why we’re doing it, we explain, we give them data, and we reaffirm our commitment that we ultimately want people in the premium service. We look at Prime Music as the best service you can get without having to spend an extra $10 a month out in the marketplace. But ultimately, it has limited functionality compared to a full on-demand service and we want people to upgrade at the end of the day.
Is the bigger music catalog Amazon’s real reason for the changes?
From a listener standpoint — and giving Amazon a fair amount of leeway here for understanding its own usage data — I’d say the changes will be very popular. A massively larger music catalog will keep listeners from churning out of the service for lack of particular artists, ad-free listening is unquestionably a better user experience than ad-supported, and the big selection of ad-free podcasts make Amazon Music a great podcast app even if you’re not interested in streaming music.
From a Prime-subscriber standpoint, Amazon Music Prime’s bigger music catalog plus ad-free music and podcasts improve the overall value of a Prime subscription, especially if you currently use another streaming-music service. Amazon Music — not surprisingly — also integrates seamlessly into the Amazon ecosystem of Fire TV and Alexa devices without you having to sign up or pay extra for it.
From a competitive standpoint, ad-free music gives Amazon Music Prime a huge advantage over Spotify’s free tier. Amazon can afford to lose money on music licensing while giving each Amazon Prime subscriber another reason to stay an Amazon Prime subscriber. Spotify is in no such position because only 40 percent of its 456 million monthly active users are premium subscribers; they rest are ad-supported listeners. Ad-free Amazon Music Prime and Amazon’s many-tentacled marketing machine will give Amazon a great opportunity to take market share from market-leading Spotify.
Do I need to subscribe to Amazon Music Unlimited?
If you listen mainly to playlists and don’t need to download tracks to your device, you won’t need to subscribe to Amazon Music Unlimited. If listening to albums in order and downloading tracks to your phone are absolute musts, you will. If you do subscribe, Amazon Music Unlimited ($8.99 a month) is cheaper than Apple Music ($10.99 a month) or Spotify ($9.99 a month). If you aren’t an Amazon Prime subscriber, Amazon Music Unlimited is a still-not-bad $9.99 a month.
How does the Amazon Music user experience compare to Spotify?
In the two weeks that I’ve been using Amazon Music as my main music and podcast iPhone app, I’ve found it to have a simple, intuitive design with no compromises on functionality compared to Spotify. Amazon has “Music” and “Podcasts” tabs at the top of the Home and Library screens, so it’s easy to toggle between the two. The organizational scheme is Netflix-like content rows with titles like “Trending Songs,” “Holiday Music,” and “Featured This Week.” Playlists are easy to build and revise.
Amazon Music’s simple, intuitive design is a flashing red reminder that Spotify’s user experience has become progressively more dense and unintuitive glob of new features piled on top of old features. Spotify has a row of icons including a bell and a clock (🤷♂️), a row with “Music” and “Podcasts & Shows” tabs (why not just “Podcasts”?), a row with a 2x3 grid of recently played playlists and podcasts, and content rows. It’s all too much.
One caveat: Spotify has largely withheld its original podcasts from Amazon Music. If you want to listen to The Ringer’s The Big Picture or Gimlet’s Case 63 — The Ringer and Gimlet are both owned by Spotify — you’ll have to listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or another podcast app. Other shows like The Joe Rogan Experience and Call Her Daddy are exclusive to Spotify.
How does the Amazon Music user experience compare to Apple Music and Apple Podcasts?
Notably, Amazon Music does in one app what Apple does in two. Apple Podcasts has paid subscription channels, and Apple Music has a lot of original shows like Elton John’s Rocket Hour and Mike D’s The Echo Chamber. Beyond that, Amazon Music has a comparable user experience to Apple Podcasts and Apple Music.
What does Amazon Music lack that it really, really needs?
Not a lot. I’d like to see the ability to add subscription channels and custom feeds for premium podcasts. I’d like to see Amazon integrate Amazon Music and Audible into a single app at some point. I’d like to see some artist involvement like an interview series and artist-curated playlists. All in all, the recent updates to Amazon Music Prime have made Amazon Music a top-tier service worth checking out.