After months of speculation, Amazon has today announced a full-fledged music streaming service, offering subscriptions as low as $3.99 per month for owners of its Amazon Echo speaker.
Designed to go head-to-head with the likes of Spotify and Apple Music in the streaming market, Amazon Music Unlimited, the service lets offers access a vast bank of songs on demand, yet, unlike its competitors, offers a far more flexible pricing model compared the $9.99 per month industry standard.
Subscribers to the service on the firm’s Echo speakers will only be charged $3.99 per month; while the cost for Amazon Prime subscribers is $7.99 per month.
Those who subscribe to neither of those services will be charged – you guessed it - $9.99 per month.
Aside from a more flexible pricing model, Amazon Music Unlimited will also differentiate itself in the mark with a new feature called Alexa, which is essentially Amazon's own version of Apple's Siri. This will allow users to control the service and select songs via voice recognition technology.
The service is available in the US from today and will be launching in the UK an other parts of Europe later this year.
“Amazon Music Unlimited brings real value to the millions of people who are already Prime members, with a choice of subscribing for only $7.99 a month or even $79 per year," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. "Plus, customers are going to love Amazon Music’s all-new app for iOS, Android and desktop. And if you want a sense of the future of voice-controlled music, go ahead and ask Alexa for a free Music Unlimited trial, and play around on your Echo. If you don’t know the name of a song but know a few lyrics, if you want to hear songs from a specific decade, or even if you’re looking for music to match your mood, just ask.”
