Last month Carly noted some of the reasons that Prime Music as rumored – limited selection, older titles – made sense in the context of the other Prime offerings. Well, overnight Amazon introduced Prime with access to a million songs and hundreds of curated playlists. The depth and breadth are limited, but it provides a decent entry point.
As noted on the Prime home page:
Prime Music gives you unlimited, ad-free access to over a million songs and hundreds of playlists. And the best part is…it’s free for Prime members
You can search the offerings and play specific Amazon-curated playlists. You can also create your own playlists, and by adding songs to your library you get unlimited offline playback as well. Searching is a bit hit-or-miss, as I could search ‘Miles Davis’ and come up with the entire ‘Kind of Blue’ album … but searching for ‘Kind of Blue’ was less helpful. I found browsing worked much better. As of now Amazon Prime Music doesn’t include any offerings from Universal Music Group, which remains the topic market share music provider and includes obscure artists such Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Kanye and Jay-Z.
Amazon has an announcement event on June 18th, and it is likely they will elaborate on the Prime Music service then.
Several Sleater-Kinney albums are available, including a few I didn’t have in digital form.
I’m also noticing lots of bands have live albums available, and you can add individual songs to your library.
I am very, very happy, but as I’ve said many times-my musical tastes are frozen in time from when I was about 22, so I’m good with an older library. 🙂
haha – I am totally not a ‘hits’ person, but could easily find several albums that I added. While it is limited now, I really think it will continue to grow – especially once UMG comes on board.
Yup. Also, the apps are being updated-my phone showed the update about 20 minutes ago and now there’s a whole PRIME music section. Yay!
Same here – on the iPad it is pretty sweet, and all of the new stuff you ‘add to library’ dumps in with your purchases and stuff you upload. It really is pretty great.
I would love if this could replace my Spotify service. One less expense is always good!