Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, and YouTube are currently the big names in the music streaming industry. Streaming music means listening to unlimited online music, via ads or subscription. Amazon hopes to get in on the riches of streaming and include themselves to that list of music streaming powerhouses.
Americans streamed a record of more than 900 billion songs during this past year. Stats show that subscription-based services such as Spotify and Apple Music have grown popular among American music lovers. Spotify has nearly 100 million subscribers, to 56 million from No. 2 Apple Music. There is an increasingly large audience that is set on getting their music needs through streaming services and Amazon wants in.
Apple offers free trials of its service but doesn’t offer a free tier for listening to music with ads, beyond genre radio stations. Spotify allows a free and a paid platform for listing that is supported by ads. Billboard reports that Amazon looks to launch a similar service, which would be available only if you ask Alexa. The songs could be accessed via the Echo connected speakers, which are made by Amazon.
Amazon currently offers some 2 million songs available free to Echo owners who also pay $119 yearly to subscribe to the company’s Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime includes perks such as expedited shipping, online music, movies, and TV. A more full-featured music offering, Amazon Music Unlimited, is available for $9.99 monthly, or $7.99 monthly for Prime members.
Amazon has said it has over 100 million subscribers to the Prime service already. This is a big audience that should be tapped into. Since Streaming, both ad-supported and subscription-based, now accounts for 65 percent of U.S. music revenues the time is right to tap in. Streaming and has long replaced CDs and downloads as the number one way of music consumption and Amazon knows this.
It’s said that streaming has accounted for $3.4 billion dollars in 2018 so far, a total that amounts to 75 percent of overall revenue for the record industry. We asked music streamer, Sophia Murphy if she thinks streaming is the way to go. “Streaming makes sense, for free or for a couple of bucks a month you can access an extensive library. There’s no point in listing to the radio anymore if you can just choose the station or song you want to hear.”
