Amazon launches free ‘Prime Music’ streaming service for Prime members

Amazon on Thursday launched its rumored Prime Music streaming music service, providing Amazon Prime members with unlimited, ad-free streaming of over one million songs for free. Amazon Prime members can add Prime Music to their existing libraries, with personalized recommendations, hundreds of expert-programmed playlists, offline playback and more at no additional cost. 

Prime Music is available on Mac and PC, alongside a wide range of smartphones and tablets: iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire devices and most Android smartphones and tablets. The streaming service is also accessible directly on the Amazon website. To go along with the change, the Amazon Cloud Player app has been renamed as Amazon Music. Prime members can use the app to download music for offline playback and more.
Amazon is the latest entrant in an increasingly competitive streaming music market, which includes heavyweights Spotify, Pandora and Rdio, and more recently Apple following its Beats Music acquisition. Prime Music launches at an important time, as consumers increasingly turn to subscription-based streaming services in lieu of paying for individual music downloads on iTunes or elsewhere.

Before you jump ship, Prime Music has two major caveats worth noting. First and foremost, the service is only available in the United States due to licensing agreements with record labels. The second is that most the songs in the Prime Music library are over six months old, likely because it allows Amazon to save on royalty costs. So if you’re anyone but an American that likes old music, you might look past this.
Amazon Prime is a premium service that provides members with free two-day shipping, instant videos, access to the Kindle Library and, now, unlimited streaming on Prime Music. The program costs $99 for a 12-month membership, with a free 30-day trial available. Amazon currently has over 20 million Prime members.

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