Amazon hopes HD music will give it an edge
Amazon has launched a premium highdefinition (HD) music streaming service as it tries to differentiate itself in a competitive landscape dominated by Spotify and Apple.
The service, which Amazon says will deliver songs to smartphones at CD-quality sound or better, is priced at $13 a month for members of Amazon’s Prime shipping programme, and $15 a month for others. This is $5 a month more than the price of Amazon Music, its standard music streaming service.
“Quality audio started as a niche audiophile thing. But we think this is going to move into a mass-market phenomenon, and Amazon is going to push it forward,” said Steve Boom, head of music for Amazon.
Spotify pioneered the streaming model for the music industry but several others have mimicked its service, providing consumers with a sea of options offering roughly the same product: about 50-million songs for $10 a month.
Amazon trails Spotify and Apple by a wide margin, but has been adding subscribers quickly through a range of tiers. It had 32-million music users by April, 70% up on a year earlier. At the end of June, Spotify had 232million users, 108-million of whom pay for its service.
Amazon has been selling music since the CD era in the 1990s and offered MP3 years downloads after Apple but it ’was s equivalent late to streaming, launching Amazon Music in autumn 2016, two streaming service debuted.
The company does not disclose its revenues from music, but analysts estimate them to be a small fraction of its overall business.
Now that streaming has become mainstream, Amazon has bet that sound quality will be the next frontier in the battle for customers.
“The one thing left behind [with the advent of music streaming] has been audio quality,” said Boom.
The other big music service that offers HD streaming is Tidal, at a cost of at least $20 a month. Amazon priced its HD service lower because the company wanted it to become “mass market” rather than a niche product, Boom said. Amazon is also offering threemonth free trials.
In a statement released by Amazon, Canadian singersongwriter Neil Young said that “Earth will be changed forever when Amazon introduces highquality streaming to the masses”. Young recently published a book called To Feel the Music: A Songwriter’s Quest to Save High-Quality Audio about the decline of audio quality in the digital age.
Amazon Music has grown quickly, in part thanks to Alexa, the in-home digital assistant, which plays music in response to voice commands to the wireless Amazon Echo device.
AMAZON TRAILS SPOTIFY AND APPLE BY A WIDE MARGIN, BUT HAS BEEN ADDING SUBSCRIBERS QUICKLY THROUGH A RANGE OF TIERS