Amazon Music may become legitimate competition for Spotify's streaming service

Amazon Music may become legitimate competition for Spotify's streaming service

Amazon's new streaming service officially launches for Amazon Prime subscribers.

Starting today, users who already have Amazon’s Prime service can use a new on-demand streaming service which may prove capable of competing with Spotify.

Amazon Music allows users to browse through a catalogue of over 1 million songs and a large collection of curated playlists, then stream their favorite songs on-demand through Wi-Fi or their data plan. As with Spotify, users can download tracks directly to a device and play them even while offline.

Amazon Music works on iPhones, iPads, Amazon Kindle tablets, Android devices, Mac and PC, and there’s also a browser version. It conveniently encompasses all of your past Amazon MP3 or Cloud music purchases and puts them all in one place.

The most glaring downside to the new Prime streaming service is that you have to be an Amazon Prime member to use it, and Prime membership costs $99 a year after the most recent cost increase. The relatively small size of its music catalog might also keep it from truly costing with rivals – Amazon reached licensing deals with Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and independent labels, but not with Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music corporation. That leaves music by popular artists Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and Kanye West out of Prime Music for now. The fact remains that there are still plenty of bugs to be worked out.

“In particular, the Search function is pretty terrible in its current state. More often than not, plugging in an artist or specific song would result in a hit, but once the song, album, or artist was selected, a loading screen would freeze the screen until an error message appeared.”

However, despite its initial kinks and shortcomings, Business Insider states that Amazon Music is “a nice cherry on top of an already solid bundle of services,” and remains optimistic over the streaming service’s future.

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