Amazon is challenging Spotify and Apple with its new on-demand music streaming service named Amazon Music Unlimited.
The service is priced at $7.99 per month for Amazon Prime members, making it substantially cheaper than its peers. Users can choose to pay an even cheaper rate of $79 per year. Owners of Echo devices can enjoy the service at $3.99 per month.
The service comes with an exhaustive music catalog with millions of songs. The catalog also includes over two million songs from Prime Music. Amazon has partnered with three major labels as well as with several indie brands for this purpose. The service features a music discovery search engine and it allows for custom-made as well as algorithmically generated playlists.
Amazon Music Unlimited is tightly integrated with Echo devices, thus making Alexa all the more relevant. Users can command Alexa to play music. Alexa is also able to tell the name of the singer even if the user only knows just partial lyrics of a song. It will also be able to customize music to suit your mood. Amazon claims that Alexa will get better with more and more use.
The service is currently available in the US only. Amazon Music Unlimited has not collaborated with any major artist or album exclusively. The company said that it is in the evaluation mode and yet to decide whether to opt for such route or not.