As predicted, Amazon Prime has joined the ranks of music streaming services today as its new Prime Music service has now gone live. This is a natural extension of the offerings available on Prime, which began as a $50 program to ensure free two-day shipping of purchased items from the online store. Since that initial conception, the program has expanded to include movies and television titles as well as books. Let’s look at the pros and cons of Prime Music as it now appears.
The Good
It’s a potential way to increase music sales. At least that’s how it’s being sold to record labels, and the company has an argument in that Amazon DVD sales have increased since Prime was introduced. The service has included Buy buttons that make it easy to fill out an existing music catalog that you might already have, but the big question still exists – why buy it if you can get it any time you want? Movies and TV shows rotate out of Amazon’s catalog all the time, so that might be a compelling argument to buy a DVD of something if it’s your favorite, but the rights issues involved in music prevent that from happening, although the average Prime customer may not be aware of that fact.
There’s no advertising on the service. This is a plus for the user but it also should be expected for a premium tier service.
Many songs are synched with lyrics. Many, but not all, of the songs offered in the Prime Music catalog offer simultaneous lyric availability thanks to a deal with LyricFind. That’s not such a big deal for some people, a bigger one for others, but it is a unique feature of the service.
There’s lots of playlists. Curated music is the word of the day in the streaming music world and every service is now making darn sure that they have a horse in the race. Prime Music is no exception, as the company is said to have recruited a team of music experts to create to create hundreds of playlists that range from “best of’s” to ones tailored to a specific mood.
The Bad
The price will increase to $99. Adding music was not only a way for Amazon to round out its premium product but to increase the price as well. It may well have met with substantial resistance to the price increase without having music available, but even those who will rarely use that part of the service might feel at least a tiny bit more assuaged by this extra feature when they get the higher bill.
The song catalog is limited. Prime Music begins life with only 1 million songs in its catalog. This pales in comparison to most other services that regularly spout figures of 20+ million songs. That said, it’s also been regularly noted that most of those songs are rarely listened to so many won’t exactly be missed. If Prime Music has the right 1 million songs, that’s still plenty to keep the average listener engaged for a lifetime. It doesn’t do the company much good marketing-wise though, where escalating catalog numbers are a way of differentiating between services (although a poor one).
There are no current hits. Amazon made a deal with the record labels only for their catalog items, not what’s currently hot. A record will be added only after it’s been out for six months. In all likelihood this allowed the company to cut a better deal with the labels, and considering its Prime Music demographic probably doesn’t care about what’s currently on the charts anyway, most likely won’t be much of a negative.
Only two of the major labels have signed on. This may be the biggest negative of all, since the largest major record label, Universal Music Group, has yet to sign on so none of its artists (like Jay-Z, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, not to mention classic acts like Stevie Wonder, U2 and Bon Jovi) are available on the service. Actually, you have to hand it to Amazon for launching as planned despite not having Universal on board. Most other services would have waited.
Although it’s not publicly stated, it’s reported that Amazon Prime currently has somewhere around 10 million subscribers in the US and around 20 million worldwide. If all were to suddenly engage in Prime Music that would immediately make the service one of the major players in the streaming music world. The big question is, how many of its subscribers will actually care that they even have the music feature available? Will adding music discourage subscriber churn or even increase its subscriber base? These are just a few of the more interesting questions when it comes to Amazon Prime Music. That said, there’s another new streaming music service now available, and that’s a good thing for the music business.
