Amazon Prime is adding music to the mix. On Thursday, after much speculation, the online retailer launched a streaming service called Prime Music, at no additional cost for Prime members who pay $99 a year. Those members will automatically gain access to more than 1 million songs, including what Amazon says are tens of thousands of albums from top acts like Justin Timberlake, Pink, Bruno Mars, Blake Shelton, The Lumineers, Bruce Springsteen, and Madonna. Amazon Prime has come a long way for a subscription service that was initially all about two-day free shipping. Through the nine years of Amazon Prime’s existence, the company has added streaming movies and TV shows, and a Kindle lending library of more than 500,000 books.
Amazon made a splash last night when it announced Prime Music, a new service that lets subscribers to its Amazon Prime shipping service stream music for free. As a music fan and a subscriber to both Rdio and iTunes Match, I was interested to see what Amazon brought to the table. What immediately stood out was the service’s patchwork selection. Amazon has clearly tried to focus on the most popular tracks available in order to make its service appeal to as many people as possible right out of the gate. But there’s a *lot of music* missing from Amazon’s catalog. It’s entirely possible I just have really strange musical taste, but at least a third of all the searches I ran against the Prime Music catalog turned up incomplete or nonexistent results. I understand that the limited selection is directly tied to Prime Music’s low price, but that didn’t make the absence of my favorite tracks any less frustrating, and I expect other consumers will feel the same way. On the bright side, the music that is available is high enough quality to sound good to my ears. Hardcore audiophiles may disagree with me, but I’ve found Prime Music’s audio quality is definitely good enough for listening on the go as well as relaxing at home.
