Amazon launches Prime Music service in India
NEW DELHI: Online retailer Amazon India launched Amazon Prime Music, an ad-free music streaming service, exclusively for Prime members at no additional cost on Wednesday.
The service comes to India nearly four years after its international launch in June 2014 and includes, in Amazon’s own words, ‘tens of millions of songs’ across major international and Indian labels in over 10 languages including English, Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi, Bengali, Kannada, Telugu and more.
Besides offering unlimited offline downloads, the service will provide voice control on Alexa, a finely tuned automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding engine.
Amazon Prime Music will be available on Android and IOS mobile phone apps, desktop app and web player, Amazon Fire TV sticks and Amazon Echo devices.
In November, Amazon increased the subscription price for Prime to ₹999 a year from ₹499. The company launched Prime in July 2016 at an initial discount of 50% from its price of ₹999.
“Our vision for this service is that we have no feature restrictions for customers. As we roll it out internationally, our goal is to make it really simple and easy for customers to listen to the music they want to and provide a lot of personalisation tools for them to experiment with new music,” said Sean Mcmullan, director, international expansion, Amazon Music. The service is currently available in coun- tries like the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany and Amazon has drawn lessons from these markets to bring to India. “With this launch, we think we’re going to make music streaming easier and more fun than ever before,” Mcmullan said.