One year after its U.S. bow, Amazon’s Prime Music streaming service has launched in the U.K., providing British consumers with a fresh alternative in the increasingly crowded streaming market.
As per Amazon’s North American offering, the ad-free service is bundled into the existing Prime subscription deal, which costs £79.00 ($120.00) for yearly access and provides users with access to 1 million tracks — a vastly smaller catalogue than the 30 million-plus songs on offer at Apple Music and Spotify, but a cheaper price when compared to the standard U.K. subscription rate of £9.99 ($15.00) per month.
Like the U.S. Prime Music service, its younger, transatlantic sibling also launches without repertoire from Universal artists, although catalogue from Warner, Sony Music and a number of independents is available. A press release from Amazon U.K. trumps music from “One Direction, Royal Blood, George Ezra, Paolo Nutini, Ella Henderson, Bob Dylan, Madonna and David Bowie and hundreds of playlists” among the one million tracks on offer, with the promise of “more music is being added all the time.”
Amazon’s Prime service launched in the U.K. eight years ago, initially offering unlimited free one-day delivery and steadily growing to now encompass over 800,000 e-books available to borrow, 15,000 movies and TV episodes via Prime Instant Video and, introduced last fall, free unlimited photo storage courtesy of Amazon Cloud Drive.
“We said then that we were just getting started, and today we’re introducing Prime Music — more than a million songs from bestselling artists, plus hundreds of Prime Playlists hand-built by our team of music experts — all at no additional cost,” said Christopher North, managing director at Amazon U.K. in a statement. North went on to call the streaming service “the latest great addition for our U.K. Prime members,” adding, “we think they’re going to love it.”
Prime Music is available on iOS and Android operating systems (through the Amazon Music app) as well as web browsers and Amazon Fire tablets and smartphones. In addition to accessing Amazon’s catalogue, members can mix songs with their own personal collection.
