Amazon has just announced a new free music service for Echo owners. If you’re not a Prime member with access to Prime Music and are not an Amazon Music Unlimited subscriber, you can now stream music from Amazon on your Echo device without paying anything.
Amazon’s new free music service is ad-supported, so expect to hear ads between songs if you’re not a Prime member or an Amazon Music Unlimited subscriber. That is to be expected since the two most popular music services with free listening, Spotify and Pandora, work the same way. All Echo devices immediately have access to the new free Amazon Music service.
A key difference between the free service and Amazon’s paid music services is that you can’t request specific songs or albums. Music requests for the free service are limited to playlists and stations. You can ask for a specific playlist from over 1,000 available or ask for a station by requesting music related to a specific genre, decade, or artist.
The selection of free music is identical to the over 2 million song Prime Music library, according to TechCrunch. If you want access to more music, you’ll need to pay $3.99 per month for access to Amazon Music Unlimted on a single Echo device or $7.99(Prime)/$9.99(non-Prime) per month for the multi-device Amazon Music Unlimited plans.
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Pretty cool!
Hey Amazon, Pandora welcomes you to the year 2004. Congratulations!
Hi, Sounds good but will this be available in the Australia and New Zealand marketplace? Often services or specials don’t include us. Apple music is a good example of something available in the USA but not in our part of the world. Smiles
So this is basically Amazon’s version of Pandora. Cool.
I have both the Echo and the Google Home, and I don’t pay for Google music but if I ask for music, it plays songs in that category or by a certain artist with NO commercials. I don’t see Google advertising this feature much. For me, it’s like Pandora but no commercials, but Amazon’s new service is just like Pandora.
I’m guessing you have some sort of ad blocking service in place.
It’s a way to get people into the Amazon realm for very little money. (Cost of an on sale Dot for instance) For me I would rather no service than advertising service…..
A question would be can you link other services from this, like SiriusXM Iheart and Tunein?
You’ve been able to use Echo with your existing SiriusXM/iHeart/TuneIn accounts all along.
Will be great when Echo Auto comes out because I use the Echo single plan for 4 bucks as I have no use for music on my phone as I have lots of music stored there, but it would be nice to listen to some music in the car without having to jump from 4-10 dollars to do it.