Rumor turned to reality fast, as yesterday’s reports of an imminent Prime Music launch came true this morning. We will post our review of the new music-streaming plan later today.
Here are the known facts:
- As expected, the service is bundled into Amazon Prime, the $99/year plan which delivers free shipping of Amazon purchases, streaming movies (similar to Netflix), streaming TV shows, and now streaming music.
- The catalog is small, and notably missing Universal Music Group recordings entirely. UMG is the world’s largest label group.
- Even given major-label licenses in place (Sony Music and Warner Music Group), chart-topping hits are not necessarily included in the service. Earlier reports of no music released in the last six months are reportedly exaggerated. But a quick check of the top five tracks in the Billboard Hot 100 chart delivered only one hit (All of Me by John Legend) in Prime Music.
- Prime Music will be available to Prime subscribers across the device landscape — computer, iPhone, Android phones, tablets, and of course Amazon’s own line of Kindle Fire HD/HDX tablets. At the time of this post, only the computer desktop version was visible in our testing.
Amazon does not break out Prime subscriber metrics, but estimates range up to 20-million members. Prime Music is launching to U.S. users only, making it more difficult to estimate subscriber impressions. But assuming something close to 10-million subscribers to whom Prime Music will be offered at no additional charge, this launch instantly makes Prime Music one of the biggest subscription music services in the world. Spotify recently celebrated reaching the 10-million benchmark of subscribers to Spotify Premium, worldwide.