J
Justin Herrick
Guest
The competition between music streaming services is fierce. Everyone from tech giants to smaller, individual services are going at it to get ahold of you for some listening time. In June, Amazon entered the arena with an extension to its Prime subscription that costs $99. The company introduced Prime Music, an unlimited music streaming service that has absolutely no advertisements. Prime Music offers more than one million songs by thousands of artists to be streamed endlessly. It is built into the Amazon Music app that brings together your existing library, a traditional store, and Prime Music.
Getting started with Prime Music is incredibly simple. Have Amazon Music installed? Have an Amazon Prime subscription? You now have Prime Music. Enter your email and password into the app and you’re good to go. Amazon Music breaks down into a few sections — Your Library, New Music, Prime Music. The slideout menu exposes these sections with additional choices as well as the Settings, Downloads, and Help buttons. This opening menu goes away, however, once you start listening to music as it collects recently played albums. From here on, the slideout menu is the go-to for navigation.
There is no way getting around Prime Music’s meager catalog. The amount of songs offered by Prime Music seems like a lot on paper, but not so when comparing it to other services. Google Play Music All Access lets users stream anything that Google Play offers and Spotify features a mighty twenty million songs. It is not like Prime Music is completely dated or anything. Prime Music has a little bit of this and a little bit of that — a mixed bag in which you never really know what you are going to get.
The albums section also shows how much Prime Music’s catalog is lacking. You will never get the freedom of thinking “Oh, I want to listen to [artist name]” and being served with appropriate music. Though, I will say that Prime Music delivers best when looking for older music from the 1970s or 1980s.
Perhaps Amazon tries to make things better with the playlist section. Users can create playlists but Amazon has shared some pre-made ones. They vary from hits of a certain era to artist-specific collections. There is a wide variety and this is a good way to curate music for a listener that does not know what exactly to listen to; however, someone wanting an already-generated playlist can save money and go with something like iHeartRadio or Pandora. Those services do just fine in composing custom channels at no cost.
Playback with the Amazon Music app is extremely clean and simple. Starting a song displays its name, the artist’s name, and traditional playback buttons. The drop down button will include ways to view more music found on an album and its artist. Useful shuffle and repeat buttons are here, too. While here, you can share your activity with Facebook.
Outside of the app, Amazon Music can be controlled from a few different places. The traditional playback buttons will appear on the lockscreen and in the notification tray. To gain even easier access, there is a handy widget that can be placed on the homescreen.
The biggest issue with Prime Music is that it is not at all comparable to its competition. And that could actually be alright with Amazon. Projecting Prime Music as a download-focused service to grow your music collection would be wise. The catalog is far too small to be taken seriously as a music streaming service alone. It has some of today’s popular songs, some of yesterday’s, and some of the songs you probably forgot about. Its design is boring and unintuitive, albeit useful. None of this is enough in the music streaming arena.
What is important with Prime Music is that it is an extension of the Prime subscription. Absolutely no one will subscribe just because Prime Music exists. Everyone subscribes because of the free two-day shipping and respectable video streaming service. Prime Music seems to be Jeff Bezos’ way of creating more value since the price of a Prime subscription recently increased by $20.
So if you have a Prime subscription, Prime Music is just there. And for non-subscribers, you are much better off looking elsewhere. There are free services that deliver much better than Prime Music.
Come comment on this article: [App Review] Amazon joins an already crowded field with Prime Music
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