1. Given my listening habits, the library feels limited. Tried searches for the three albums I listened to the most this month (<a href="http://www.last.fm/user/labibrahman/charts" rel="nofollow">http://www.last.fm/user/labibrahman/charts</a>):<p><pre><code> Sylvan Esso - Sylvan Esso
Chet Faker - Built on Glass
Tycho - Awake
</code></pre>
None are available for streaming. For a standalone service, this would be damning. As one of the perks offered with Prime this has the potential to become a compelling part of the package.<p>2. Amazon's store interface is not well suited for consuming media. I tried watching a few episodes of Friday Night Lights on the service instead of Netflix. Spoilers in episode descriptions meant that I had to very specifically control where I let my eyes over the UI. Next episodes don't auto play. Perhaps most annoyingly, there isn't a standalone URL I could go to for my streaming needs. To watch an episode I had to carry out the following steps:<p><pre><code> Navigate to amazon.com
Search for Friday Night Lights
Skim the results to click on the TV show
Remember what season I was on
Skim the episode descriptions while avoiding spoilers
Click to stream, and make sure I don't accidentally click
on the 1-click buy button which is annoyingly right next
to the stream button.
</code></pre>
My flow on Netflix:<p><pre><code> Navigate to netflix.com
Click on the continue watching pane on top left corner of my screen.
</code></pre>
I want Amazon to be a legitimate competitor in the space, but running everything through the store interface is killing any chance of me using Prime as a media consumption service.<p>3. I suspect that this works many orders of magnitude better on the Kindle Fire line of devices and that's great for people who already own Kindle Fires. If I don't already own one though, the Prime ecosystem should be driving to make that purchase and right now it is failing at that task.
The UX for this is very awkward (unless I'm missing something) - the "store" and the "player" are completely disjoint experiences with only a few marketing links between them. You can't actually add new (free) "Prime Music" to your collection from the player - you have to jump to the "store" to discover the music you want and add it to your cloud library. Nor can you play full songs from the "store", even if you have Prime and they are free - you are limited to 30 second samples.<p>The amazing thing about Rdio and Spotify, and what makes streaming services different than their MP3 purchasing predecessors, is that you can think "I want to listen to Kanye", type "Kanye" in to the search bar, press enter and listen. Amazon is making this whole process very awkward by adding a "buy" step (even if no money is changing hands).<p>The reason that Spotify is disruptive isn't that the music is paid for via subscription pricing - it's that it eliminates the distinction between "music I own" and "all of the music ever recorded".
This is seriously a usability disaster. I have to go through the normal Amazon store to add music to my prime library? I have to leave the player to find music to listen to? No thank you.
Prime subscriber here. Cool beans. I found some of my favorites.<p>But I also found a lot of spammy crap. I searched for Smashing Pumpkins, and it's pages of "1979 [A Tribute to the Smashing Pumpkins]" or "Disarm [In The Style Of The Smashing Pumpkins]". It takes some work to figure out, no, they don't actually have them.<p>I'm reminded of Steve Jobs's line with the introduction of the iTMS:<p><i>"This number [of songs] could have easily been much higher, if we wanted to let in every song. But we realize record companies do a great service. They edit!"</i><p>Here's hoping they can grow their library, but in the meantime, please don't give me piss when I search for rain.
Note that this only applies to US Amazon Prime accounts.<p>If you are an Amazon Prime customer in another region, Amazon will ignore that and ask you to start another Amazon Prime subscription. But I doubt your second Prime account will actually come with any of the advertised benefits.<p>Which, for an international company with accurate knowledge of my billing address, is misleading and hamfisted.
Isn't anyone interested in owning their music anymore? Have we all become such casual consumers of music that the concept of building a permanent library of music they like is unnecessary?<p>I will never understand the appeal of subscription music services.
The classical collection seems to be small. For example, 24098 out of 658027 (3.7%) pop albums are prime, but only 894 of 171251 (0.5%) classical albums are prime. I expected the other way (wishfully, as a fan of classical music), that older less popular music is cheaper to be made prime for Amazon. Strange.
Wow. This is outstanding. Amazon is solidly developing a one-stop centralized base of entertainment. Even more enticing is that it's <i>free</i> with prime, and even if you don't have prime, it's worth getting prime for: a small fee for a year's access to most music/films you could want. And then you have prime, which makes it much more enticing to buy products on Amazon (due to cheaper, faster delivery). Smart.<p>(I am aware that Amazon's music library is currently not as large as that of its competitors. I think it is reasonable to assume that this will change in the near future.)<p>The more significant thing to note here is that the general trend in online businesses (obvious examples will include Google, Apple, and Facebook) is that every business is trying to create its own walled garden --- they try to provide all the services that any user could need, such that the user would not do business with any competitors, and so the user would interface with the business as much as possible. Apple did a remarkably good job at this with iTunes back in the day --- they were the first to provide access to a massive online store of entertainment and to integrate it very heavily with their products.<p>Amazon, however, is taking the cake in this respect. Their products are extremely well-integrated: www.amazon.com is gradually becoming a one-stop-destination for most media and for general shopping. Perhaps this is due to Amazon's perseverance: I've never seen Amazon weaken its hold on a particular share of any market.
Seems like the library is a little limited. As of tonight (2014-06-11 23:19 PST), two of the top songs on Rdio and Spotify are "Problem' by Ariana Grande and "Fancy" by Iggy Azalea. Neither are available on Prime Music, only for purchase on the normal MP3 Store. I suppose the advantage is a lot of people <i>already</i> have Prime, but I don't see any reason to jump ship from either Rdio or Spotify for this.
If this can match spotify's catalog any time soon, AND be available as an app or (usable) mobile site, ad free: RIP music services. This is an enticing offer for those on the fence about prime, given that spotify premium is $120 a year. For the same price, you get prime, spotify, a bit of netflix/hulu (hopefully more to come on the video end).<p>Pretty brilliant move.
This has the same problems that I have with Prime Video:<p>1) The interface is rather horrid when compared to services in the same category, like Netflix. Others have already expounded on this though, so I won't waste the bytes.<p>2) I hate, hate, HATE being told I have access to all these movies/songs, only to find that the content I searched for isn't available to stream unless I pay extra money on top of the service I already have. Logically I say that it's better to have extra options- but I've never gotten as mad at Netflix for not having what I want to watch as I've gotten at Amazon for having what I want to watch, but needing to pay extra.
In addition to the music that's available via Prime, they have an "auto-rip" feature that automatically adds to your music library any tracks from physical CDs that you've purchased from Amazon in the past. Very nice.
It costs $10 per month for on-demand streaming of 16 million songs in Rhapsody. By that calculation, this offer would cost $7.5 annually. So it's a smart move for Amazon to lure people to Prime by sacrificing small fraction of revenue.<p>I'm a user of Rhapsody for almost 13 years now and love it not having to buy individual 100s of artists I listen to. Amazon's 1 million song collection is peanuts for me but for most others it might be enough. I see we are now only few months away from true commoditization of music business (i.e. pay monthly subscription to use all you want like electricity and water).
Limited selection like Prime Instant Video, but at least it's available on Android (although the app doesn't seem to support the new service yet and is butt-ugly). On a side note, I don't really get why Amazon is twisting our arms and doesn't offer Instant Video on Android outside of Google TV and Kindle Fire. I care less about their free videos, but I've purchased digital content and I'm not able to watch it on my Android tablet. Do they really think they can make me buy Kindle Fire just for that?
I am a USA prime account holder with an account that was renewed in January of this year (2014). I was curious why the amazon prime music page indicated I needed to upgrade my account, so, I clicked 'upgrade for 99 dollars'.<p>It went ahead and renewed my prime account with today's date, and sent me a new welcome email.<p>It's completely unclear if it has consumed my previous subscription with over half a year left.<p>So be cautious... probably I did not read enough!
I was actually pretty excited about this because they happen to have a lot of music I listen to (electronic). I loaded up about two dozen albums and downloaded their Android MP3 app. Tried to play a track and was told the track was no longer Prime eligible. The whole album grayed out and when accessed says "We're sorry but this album is no longer available in Amazon's catalog".
Searched for a number of things unsuccessfully then found that Neil Young is on it. Okay, tried to play "Harvest" and it refused. The <i>previews</i> for the same album work, but only after letting the Flash widget run (I use flashblock). The Prime videos use Silverlight, so that was never an issue. I can't find a widget hiding anywhere for the prime music, so I'm guessing that's a bug on their part. Or maybe I have it all wrong. Not going to waste time debugging their issues.<p>Has anyone tried the amazon lending library? Absolute rubbish. At least this has Neil Young, but the problem is, you have to have nearly everything for it to work. And also you're competing with this:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8odlwI94uFA" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8odlwI94uFA</a>
This is another case (IMHO) of Amazon being a "Jack of all trades, King of none". Prime delivery is awesome, they are king in that arena but video/music is seriously lacking in the UI/UX department.<p>They have decent content for free on Instant Video but it doesn't keep track of what you have watched and navigating is a massive PITA. Their music selection is sparse and that's me being kind... I paused my Spotify to check out their OS X app and couldn't believe how terrible it is. Search is confusing and navigating my library is not intuitive at all.<p>I will keep an eye on it but they should not have released it in this state.
I like the idea, but it seems to be poorly executed with the absolutely-dismal selection of Prime-eligible music. Good albums missing, good songs missing, even entire artists missing (even ones that were at one point pretty mainstream; Sublime, for example).<p>Amusingly, when searching for "Let It Go", I ended up with virtually every song titled "Let It Go" that's <i>not</i> sung by Idina Menzel (speaking of which, the only Idina Menzel songs available are from Glee, and there are a whole two of them that are actually sung by Idina Menzel). Disney's probably to blame for that one, but still.
Wooohooo, yet another amazon prime thing that isn't offered to Canadians. Considering we pay more, get "2 day shipping" which is actually 3 days because Amazon cant' seem to do math, and get no other services, and Amazon prices are rarely something to get excited about here, well Amazon, we're done. I just cancelled my amazon prime account. Apple, Netflix, and Google figured out ways to get media to Canada, but Amazon decided to suck donkey nuts... again.
For those wanting to compare this to Spotify, Amazon Prime Music has about 5% of the number of songs that Spotify does (1 million vs 20 million). Most notably, it's missing the entire Universal Music Group catalog as well as most new releases. At 20 dollars less per year than Spotify, while also offering Prime shipping and Prime movies, I can't imagine Amazon will be able to reach any sort of licensing arrangement where they have anywhere near the library Spotify has.
I want to like this... with Amazon video, I can read reviews, see related items, and play the video on the same page. With Amazon music I can read reviews and find related items, but to play it I must first 1) add it to my library, 2) navigate to the cloud player 3) search for the album in my library, 4) click play.<p>After finding an album using Amazon reviews and related items, this is faster: 1) Search GrooveShark/YouTube from the Chrome URL bar, 2) click play.
Amazon's cloud player was the first music locker I tried (I believe in the US it predated Spotify along with google music and certainly icloud/itunes integration). I keep forgetting to cancel my prime account, so I thought I'd check this out.<p>Beyond the comments above about UX and library content, I was surprised to find I no longer have access to my uploaded songs unless I upgrade to something called "Cloud Player Premium". No thanks.
There was a playlist I actually wanted to listen to. I added it, and I was okay with the awkward checkout flow until it prompted me to enter credit card information, despite being logged into my regular Amazon account.<p>At this point, I gave up and closed the window. I couldn't be bothered to enter this information when I already have various other streaming services. I wonder what their stats are like for the sign on funnel...
Amazon loves running experiments. I am sure they will learn and improve. I'm not gonna drop Spotify for this, but imagine Amazon will improve this over time and make it more useful. Hopefully enough to where I can drop the $100/yr Spotify subscriptions.
After reading about this on Hacker News, I went straight there to find my current favorite song, Happy, by Pharrell Williams. It wasn't there so I bought it for a $1.29. I wasn't happy. Then, I listened to the song a few times and I was happy again.
I wish they would quit rolling all of this shit into a giant monoproduct. I just want to prepay for postage.<p>edit: Is this why they raised the prices for Prime? If so, the fact that I will never use it means they're saying that they don't want me as a customer.
Can't use it as Amazon knows about my German account. Weird that it isn't a problem for Instant Video.<p>But I guess my next prime subscription will be on a new account that is only connected to the US. Maybe it will finally allow me to buy TV shows as well.
> Over a million songs and hundreds of playlists.<p>When applications like Hip Hop[1] exist and are advertising 45 million songs, a million doesn't seem that impressive.<p>[1] - <a href="http://gethiphop.net/" rel="nofollow">http://gethiphop.net/</a>
Not sure why I have to "add" to listen to Prime songs. Can't I play the full song before adding it to my library? I want to be careful what I add - it's kinda like a bookmark. I should be able to try it first.
Would love to see this work in the Sonos app. I'm a Prime member & just added a bunch of albums to my Amazon Music Player via web browser. Switched to Sonos and the AMP, but only see the ones I've purchased.
Cool. Unlike most things Amazon, such as Prime video, this service works in Japan, using a US Amazon account.<p>(I tested quickly using the Mac client for it.)
A lot of comments seems to be negative on this.<p>As a amazon prime subscriber, this is great for me, here's why:<p>1. I have amazon prime for their delivery, and this is basically a free music service for my mobile that is unmatched by anything else. (Free spotify sucks on mobile in comparison, and can't be used offline)<p>2. Downloaded songs basically gives me a library and allows me to use the song everywhere.<p>3. A million songs is a lot, unless you listen a lot to very esoteric bands, it works well.<p>The app is crashing on search for me, but it doesn't matter, the content is so great I will keep going back. Amazon Prime video already trumped netflix with their HBO library acquisition. I am psyched to see what they will try next.
At first I thought it is free music without ads: "Unlimited, ad-free streaming. Free with Amazon Prime." I noticed "Listen free for 30 days", so there is some kind of trick here.<p>I logged into the system and on the next screen they were asking for my credit card information which is needed to start a 30 day free trial on Amazon Prime (after it is $100/year). Prime is some kind of premium service for Amazon services.<p>So, Amazon Prime Music is FREE if you BUY Amazon Prime. In my opinion that is not anyway free, well okay it is for 30 days after that you will get automaticly charged.