What is Amazon Music: everything you need to know
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What is Amazon Music?
Amazon Music is a music streaming service similar to Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, Tidal, and Deezer. It offers a library of more than 100 million songs and a wide range of popular podcasts to stream and download for offline listening, too. Similarly to its competitors, Amazon Music users have access to a massive amount of current and back-catalog songs and albums and can create their own playlists that can be shared. It also uses your listening habits to create recommendations: new artists, albums, curated playlists, podcasts, and more, to help you easily find something good to play. For the audiophiles out there, Amazon Music has plan tiers for hi-resolution lossless audio that it calls HD and Ultra HD (more on this below), which is important if you’re considering Spotify, as it currently does not.
The platform’s interface and controls are easy to use and full of album artwork and visuals (taking more than a few cues from Spotify) and can be accessed in a number of ways, including iOS and Android apps, desktop apps for Mac and Windows, and web browsers, as well as Echo and Fire TV devices. Additionally, Amazon Music works with Alexa voice control, allowing you to do things like skip tracks, pause, or ask it to play something, all with voice commands.
If you’re looking for the entry-level experience to get your feet wet, its most basic plan is the ad-supported Amazon Music Free, for which you do not need to have an Amazon Prime subscription to use. The bare-bones tier is a bit limited (as most ad-based, free services are), giving you access to “millions of podcast episodes,” and thousands of playlists and stations with ads popping in between songs.
Perhaps most annoying for most people is the fact that playback is limited to only shuffle — meaning you can’t select any song you want to play — and songs are not available in the lossless HD or Ultra HD formats. All you need is a standard Amazon account, and you don’t even need to hand over your credit card information.
Amazon Music Prime
If you can’t stomach the ads of the Free tier, and you’re already an Amazon Prime subscriber (or are thinking of becoming one), Amazon Music Prime is free. Not only do you get all the perks of an Amazon Prime account like same-day shipping and Prime Video, but the music situation also opens up with ad-free access to the entire 100-million song library, podcasts, stations, and playlists. Downloads are also made available at this level, too, which is good because this tier only allows for playback on one device at a time, too, unless you’re playing downloaded music that’s stored on your device.
It doesn’t come without quirks, though. While you do get access to that expanded library (the same 100 million songs as the Unlimited tier, actually), playback of albums, artists, and playlists is still limited to shuffle mode, with the exception of the “All-Access Playlists,” which you can pick, play, skip, and download at will. Things get even more specific for Echo devices (even the All-Access Playlists are in shuffle mode), Fire TV (there’s music, but no podcasts), and Fire Tablet (where the catalog is limited and there are no ad-free podcasts), and you also don’t get access to all that HD, Ultra HD, and spatial audio goodness, either. All that said, you may just want to consider …
Amazon Music Unlimited is the full experience. It’s basically everything that the Amazon Music Prime plan offers with no pesky shuffling or limits on what you can and cannot play; just have at it. But I’ve buried the lede here — Amazon Music Unlimited is all about the sound quality. A hundred million songs are available in lossless HD format (that’s CD-quality 16-bit/44.1kHz, with an average bitrate of 850kbps), and an undisclosed “millions” of tracks in their top-level Ultra HD quality range (24-bit depth and sample rate ranging from 44.1 to 192kHz and an average bitrate 3,730kbps). These hi-resolution tracks use the FLAC audio codec and the sound is crystal clear and stunning, rivaling the sound quality of competitors like Tidal (which also uses FLAC) and Apple Music (which uses the comparable Apple ALAC codec). There are also more than a thousand tracks mastered in Dolby Atmos Music and 360 Reality Audio, should you want to space out with some immersive surround sound. Music Unlimited itself has a range of plan options (outlined below) that have a few limitations, but for the most part, it’s a robust music streaming plan worthy of consideration.
In November, Amazon announced a game-changing move: it would add Audible’s catalog of over a million audiobooks to its Amazon Music Unlimited subscription.
Starting now, Amazon Music Unlimited US, UK, and Canada subscribers can access Audible’s vast library right from the Amazon Music app. And the best part? They listen to one FREE audiobook monthly as part of an existing subscription.
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