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To be honest, for the "average" prime subscriber, the included Amazon Prime Music would be more than enough for them. For people really into music, Spotify or Apple Music are still the better options.

Yeah, I'm dropping Spotify and using Amazon Music again. I recently checked and there was only one album that they don't have, that I normally listen to. Cheaper just to buy that one album then pay even the $5 student rate I still pay with Spotify.
 
I can't tell if you're serious, advertising SiriusXM, or being sarcastic. So good job?
I don't need to advertise SiriusXm; I have the service and can get it anywhere. What I like from it is good enough for my tastes and don't need another streaming service. If I did want another streaming service I would have gotten apple music.
 
Bit of a slap in the face for all Prime subscribers expecting them to pay more. It's now created a two tier Music offering. (Three tier if you factor in the lower priced Echo customer subscriptions).

Especially UK Prime members who already do not receive all of the additional Kindle benefits etc the US customers receive.

It's not a slap in the face - this service needs to pay artists, and it's not going to be able to do that when a prime membership costs less than other subscription services even by itself.
 
The 3.99 prices is for Echo only and I do not think it will be a big hit. I actually think Amazon Echo could be in a lot of trouble with Google Home coming out. Google to me is the one company who I think is really suited to do that product right. They have all the pieces in place, especially the knowledge base from Google Search they can leverage.
 
Why do you say that you pay twice?

Get to pay twice. If you already pay for Prime, but want this as well, then you pay twice. It was mostly a light-hearted gag though, don't worry about it :D

Anyway, I'm not saying it's a bad thing necessarily, I don't use Prime music enough to begin with to even consider paying more money to them for this, so I'm glad they didn't just include it in Prime and bump the price up.
 
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I guess they had the courage to charge 3.99 :eek:

:p

Seriously, that's a great price, and even for prime members that's a nice price.

I know Apple doesn't compete on price, but if they want to continue to be players in this market they will


It only plays on echo for that price.
 
Don't know about the UK but in Germany Amazon Prime Video is almost given away for free. Every other movie service costs way more and offers far less. 4 Euros per month compared to the 10 to 20 Euros a month for the other services. And you get Amazon shipping for free! And the cloud drive for free. And the basic music library for free.

Including this new premium music library for free as well would be like stealing. The artist have to get paid too.

It's not a slap in the face - this service needs to pay artists, and it's not going to be able to do that when a prime membership costs less than other subscription services even by itself.

Understand what you're both saying. I posted my thoughts earlier in post #15 on where I think the music industry is (rightly or wrongly) going for artists.

Post #15 link
 
It only plays on echo for that price.
Yes I know. I've already said that I know you its for echo only multiple times in the thread already ;)
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Get to pay twice. If you already pay for Prime, but want this as well, then you pay twice. It was mostly a light-hearted gag though, don't worry about it :D
I don't see this any different then apple's services. Prime has some benefits, and music service has some benefits.
 
The $3.99 deal will be very popular with dentists. I am willing to bet Amazon becomes the #1 player in the dentists' office music market! I wonder if someone will come out with a mounting kit for elevators as well!

Nice idea. But $3.99 or $10 or $20 for getting music to playback technically is not the point. But paying license fees, which quickly exceed this small amount to publicly playback is in that case. Not sure how's the situation in the US, but at least in most European countries you have to pay additional licensing fees for publicly playing back music from most artists – that is, if the artist is member of a collecting company, which most artists are. Usually doctors or shopping centers like to buy royalty free music from musicians not being members of any collecting companies.
It's the same like if you go to a club, the club doesn't only pay 99 cent on iTunes for the track but licensing fees for each playback on top of the cost of buying the track.
 
That's pretty much their only profitable arm from what I've seen.

Not so. The rest of the business is profitable, although very low margin. AWS is a huge profit generator. But Amazon's strategy has always been to forego excess profits in favor of funding growth. Amazon is now the dominant player in retail, at least in the US, and its position is strengthening.
 
Amazon proves once again that big companies _can_ innovate.
Setting a great example for Apple to emulate :D

Proves? For mono music coming out of a can? Yup, they certainly beat Apple on that.

Setting the "innovation" and quality bar as low as it can go...
 
Not sure I see a huge benefit here. Maybe if it were automatically built into the Prime service. I'd rather pay $6 more to play music anywhere I want.
 
I guess they had the courage to charge 3.99 :eek:

:p

Seriously, that's a great price, and even for prime members that's a nice price.

I know Apple doesn't compete on price, but if they want to continue to be players in this market they will

The problem is, music lovers who care enough to pay a subscription for music will generally want to hear it on quality speakers, not Echo, and want access to their music everywhere. I don't think the market for this will be that big and will have a negligible impact on Apple.
 
Trying to break this down.

UK Prime membership costs £79. Supposedly £40 of that is video and £39 is the delivery benefits (based on the change in pricing when they added video). So I suppose they would say Music was never really included in this price to begin with. I suppose I can see that including a full Music service equivalent to Apple Music was never going to be realistic within the existing Prime subscription fee. But £79 + £85 for music (assumed) = £164/year is a lot to be paying to Amazon.
Don't worry, like most Amazon things we won't get it here in the UK for a while yet. And when we do it'll probably be priced to bend us over :)
 
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The problem is, music lovers who care enough to pay a subscription for music will generally want to hear it on quality speakers, not Echo, and want access to their music everywhere. I don't think the market for this will be that big and will have a negligible impact on Apple.
I enjoy music and I think a 3.99 price is better then what apple charges. Don't sell this service short, music subscriptions isn't about catering a small niche of audiophiles. Given the millions of subscribers on Spotify, Apple music and Pandora. Clearly Amazon is looking to tap that customer base and with what they're offering, they'll be very successful imo.

I do believe Apple has to worry about Amazon, they're a huge organization that has shown themselves adept at entering into markets and being successful.
 
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Don't know about the UK but in Germany Amazon Prime Video is almost given away for free. Every other movie service costs way more and offers far less. 4 Euros per month compared to the 10 to 20 Euros a month for the other services. And you get Amazon shipping for free! And the cloud drive for free. And the basic music library for free.

Including this new premium music library for free as well would be like stealing. The artist have to get paid too.

How it is in the UK is expensive. £79/year compared to €49/year for pretty much the same service.
 
Amazon can shove it. They no longer refund the price difference if an item drops in price after you order it.
 
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$9.99 is an absolute bargain if you listen to music regularly in a variety of locations (home, commute, work, gym, outdoors etc). $3.99 for something that is limited to home use is not that cheap, really.
 
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