Amazon has introduced a free version of its Prime Music service which will work even if you don’t have Prime subscription but flood your experience with plenty of ads. The service for now is available only in the United States but one would hope that a free music platform like this will make its way to India as well.
The free music service, however, as informed by Amazon, is only available for users who’ve already bought its Echo range of speakers which is powered Alexa voice assistant. This way, Amazon can continue to sign up users its well-oiled smart devices ecosystem.
The reports of Amazon launching free music streaming platform were first heard of few weeks back.
With this announcement, Amazon Music becomes one of the few platforms that are available in free avatar and they will work in the same way as Spotify, Gaana and JioSaavn do.
Much to our surprise, Amazon doesn’t want deprive the free user of its entire music catalogue, which means, users can enjoy all stations, playlists and artists on Amazon Music, with a small compromise of ads tuning in every now and then.
The free model has worked exceedingly well for brands like Gaana in the Indian market, where even Spotify decided to let users stream its content for free. This is another way for Amazon Music to increase its number of users in the world, which has become harder to achieve with hyper competition in this space.
We still don’t know if the free version of Amazon Music would allow users to rewind/skip a track or put a limit to the number of devices on which the service will work. We’ll be keeping an eye on the company’s plans to launch it in India, which hopefully should come through in the coming weeks.
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