Amazon, the leading e-commerce company has made its presence in the music industry after decades. The e-commerce company had a connection to the music for a long time. It sold CDs (compatible disks) in the 1990s over its platform. Unfortunately, Amazon was late to enter the music industry. Amazon decided to launch its Music service only in 2016 and now becomes one of the fastest growing music streaming service provider.
Users are getting attracted towards the music streaming service of Amazon and the company is adding more subscribers to its service and at a rapid rate every-day. Amazon has outperformed than its music rivals such as Spotify, Google, and Apple. Amazon has already established a strong presence in the e-commerce sector and now seeking to disrupt the music industry. Amazon music service might give tough competition to its rivals.
Amazon offers music streaming services to users like Prime Music and Amazon Music Unlimited. The number of people enrolling to Amazon Music Unlimited has increased by 70 percent in the previous year, as per people reported on its performance. While in April 2019, Amazon included around 32 million users to its entire music streaming services.
On the other side, Amazon’s rival Spotify, which is the largest music streaming service of the world, has 100 million subscribers. Spotify is adding 25 percent of new subscribers every year.
MIDiA Research analyst, Mark Mulligan stated,
“Amazon is the dark horse [in music]. People don’t pay as much attention to it [as to Apple and Spotify], but it’s been hugely effective.”
The music industry was lacking confidence for over 10 years and now the streaming service has brought back the confidence of the industry. Before Amazon launching its Music service in 2016, Apple had already launched similar kind of services two years back.
Amazon’s music streaming service might be performing better than Spotify, but Spotify is still leading the music streaming industry.
Amazon music head, Steve Boom informed that in the market there was a difference between older users and middle America. Around 14 percent of Amazon Music subscribers are between the age of 55 and higher, in comparison with 5 percent of Spotify’s users.
Boom mentioned, Amazon is not fighting for the same users as everyone does. For the music industry to reach its maximum potential, cannot only consider users between the age group of 15 to 22.
Amazon has achieved the needed boost in a few months all because of Amazons’ predominance with its users and Alexa product. Amazon’s Alexa product is a widely known product that plays music through your voice commands delivered to its wireless Echo music speaker.
Senior music executive, at the major record labels mentioned,
“Amazon have gone all in on the music. We see high engagement in their service.”
Cost of Music Service
Amazon Music service cost around 10 dollars per month and for the Prime members, the cost is at 8 dollars a month. People who use Echo speaker to listen to music the cost is around $4 per month.
While Apple’s music services cost around $10 per month and Spotify also charges the same amount for its music services.
Amazon never reveals its revenue from music services, although experts predict the revenue could be small as compared to its entire business.