Inspired by my confirmation of a soon to be released new streaming music subscription service from Amazon, called Amazon Music Unlimited, a German blogger by the name of Carsten Knobloch looked through the code of Amazon’s web-based music player and uncovered a few pieces of new information about the service. It appears the service will have a regular price of $9.99 per month. Knobloch also found reference to a $7.99 discounted price which, through some additional digging of my own, I’m confident is the price for Prime members. I also found reference to “alternative” pricing, but I’m not sure on the details of that pricing. It may refer to the rumored Echo-only plan which restricts music playback to Amazon Echo devices. Sources have told The Verge that the Echo-only plan will cost $4.99 per month and launch “within a few weeks.”
The other interesting piece of information, which Knobloch uncovered, is that subscribers of Amazon Music Unlimited will also receive unlimited music uploads to Amazon’s Cloud Drive and be able to stream that music to all of their devices. Amazon currently gives all customers the ability to store 250 songs in their Amazon Drive account for free, without counting towards their free 5GB storage. Customers also have the option to pay $24.99 per year to store 250,000 songs in their Amazon Drive. The Amazon Music Unlimited service will be the first time an unlimited music storage option has been offered by Amazon.
An ad slogan I found says Amazon Music Unlimited will “stream tens of millions of songs,” which puts it on par with services like Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Play Music. For comparison, Prime music, which will still be available to Prime members after Amazon Music Unlimited launches, only has 1.8 million songs. Each of those competing services cost $9.99 per month, so Amazon’s regular price for their new music service matches the competition. However, at $7.99 for Prime members and $4.99 for Amazon Echo owners, Amazon’s new service will clearly be the better option if you fall into one of those two categories.
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very intriguing…
Finally! I may actually be able to justify $7.99/month for unlimited uploads of my own music, as long as I get Amazon’s entire music library to go along with it.
yup, I agree
Interesting…my Music menu item is now gone. I wonder if they are trying to prevent further details from getting out.
5 dollars for Echo only is ideal for me as I find I use music streaming only for my Echo but find Prime Music inadequate and feel I need to add music of my own to compensate. I love Paul McCartney and he only has one album in total on Prime Music, from a music catalogue of over 50 albums. At the same time I find it hard to justify paying 10 bucks to Spotify when I only use it for Echo. I’m in a Catch-2 and I really hope your Echo Plan discovery is true and it can compete it the catalogue of Spotify. This was badly needed and should have been done long ago because releasing a dedicated smart music speaker like the Echo without a proper Music streaming service made no sense.