Amazon’s head of digital music and video has departed the company. Bill Carr has spent 15 years with the online retailer, and was at the helm when the company entered the markets for both online music and streaming video. He was responsible for launching Amazon’s streaming music service for customers with Prime memberships. Continue Reading
Mark Mulligan is one of the industry’s most astute observers and analysts. This guest column examines customer sharing, revenue cannibalization, and the next five years in music — “one of the music industry’s most dramatic periods of change. The last ten years might have been disruptive but the change that is coming will be even more transformative.” Continue Reading
Amazon announced the addition of a new member to its board of directors. Judy McGrath, former CEO of MTV Networks, was elected to the board in an appointment that will take effect on Oct. 1. She will join the company’s Leadership Development and Compensation Committee, according to the SEC filing that detailed her election. Continue Reading
Amazon’s Prime Music, which launched in June, has enhanced its service with “hundreds of thousands of songs,” and a big raft of new house-curated playlists. The service is pressing its strategy of providing easy lean-back listening to music mixes to Prime members, and de-emphasizing lean-forward music searching and collecting. We took the opportunity to give the service a second review, this time in an Amazon Kindle Fire HD tablet, presumably the, er, prime interface for the platform. Continue Reading
Amazon said Happy Monday to the world this morning with a press release that cheered a successful first week for Prime Music. Particulars were in short supply, but Amazon says that uptake of the new streaming music service exceeded expectations, with users accessing tens of millions of songs. Continue Reading
Brief news items and worthwhile reads from around the web: T-Mobile: Uncarrier or Unhelpful? … Audio is Expanding the Internet … Lefsetz on Amazon Prime Music Continue Reading
Amazon released its much-awaited Fire phone this week, stepping into competitive waters with Apple and Google on the hardware side. At the same time, Amazon is stabbing into the music-identification space dominated by Shazam and SoundHound, each of which gives users quick song recognition and the ability to store “finds” in partner music services like Rdio and Spotify. Amazon’s most remarkable Fire phone feature is Firefly, which identifies music and much more. Continue Reading
Mark Mulligan is co-founder of MIDiA Consulting, and has been a digital music analyst for over a decade. In this guest column, he compares Amazon’s music strategy with those of Google and Apple, and speculates about the future perceived value of music. Continue Reading
Amazon’s gleaming-new music subscription service stepped into the market today, and we dove in quickly for a test drive.
Prime Music feels like a beta service on its first morning. We found problems with playing music, and an unwieldy system for streaming whole songs, albums, and playlists, which should be easy in an on-demand streaming service. The catalog is demonstrably small, with obvious voids in which one’s listening hopes are extinguished.
But all this might not matter to the intended audience, which is (for now, at least) existing Amazon Prime members. As of today, Prime Music is instantly one of the largest music subscription services in the world. Continue Reading
Rumor turned to reality fast, as yesterday’s reports of an imminent Prime Music launch came true this morning. With Amazon Prime membership estimated between 10-million and 20-million existing subscribers, Prime Music instantly becomes one of the largest subscription music services in the world. Continue Reading
Rumor might be turning to reality once again — soon. Amazon’s purported new music service will launch this week, according to reports. Continue Reading
Amazon, long rumored to be formulating a streaming-music service, will reportedly launch one this summer with a catalog of non-current music. The music service will be bundled into Amazon Prime, a subscription-only plan that cobbles together on-demand streaming movies, TV shows, and free two-day shipping of Amazon products. Continue Reading