Amazon’s quest for country streaming supremacy
Flying below the radar in the noisy world of music streaming, Amazon Music has quietly made a sizable impact on the country genre.
The e-commerce giant has already been performing disproportionately well among country music listeners compared to top streaming competitors Spotify and Apple Music. Of its top-50 streamed songs in the final week of February, 16 were country songs. That’s compared to just one between Apple and Spotify combined. Of its top-50 albums, 18 were country albums compared to zero between Apple and Spotify.
Though it did not disclose the raw numbers, Amazon confirmed that country music’s percentage of total plays on its streaming service is twotimes the industry average.
Spotify and Apple have been active in the Nashville music community for years and both services boast impressive overall streaming statistics and subscriber numbers.
Ryan Redington, who heads Amazon’s music division, said the company’s success in country music is due at least in part to the in-roads made before its streaming service began to gain traction.
“Amazon is unique in the sense that we sell physical products,” Redington said. “We have physical customers already as part of our base. We’ve been selling CDs since 1998. So we’ve been in the music business for almost 20 years and built long relationships with those physical customers.
“And a lot of those customers are country music customers. Then I think on the streaming side, what’s nice is as those customers choose to migrate from the physical to the streaming world, we have a very welcoming platform for the country music customer.”
At a presentation at the annual Country Radio Seminar in Nashville in late February, Redington touted the company’s success with country fans. He said the company has demonstrated the importance of country with its recent investments. Amazon sponsored Garth Brook’s record-breaking tour and was the exclusive streaming partner when the country legend released finally released his catalog on the increasingly popular delivery platform.
And Amazon’s success comes as the company staffs up its Nashville office. The company announced in late February that it has hired Music Row veteran Kelly Rich as senior label relations manager for Nashville. Emily Cohen also works out of the Nashville office as music curator, focusing on tracking trends within the country genre, identifying emerging artists and building out playlists.
Amazon’s success has not gone unnoticed on Music Row. Warner Music Nashville Chairman and CEO John Esposito said his company is fully aware of how well country music is doing on Amazon Music.
“Amazon is disproportionately country,” Esposito said. “Their top 50 has (16) songs, compared to four in the overall top 200 in any given week.”