

Just like Apple, Amazon has an enormous number of credit cards on file (estimated at 300 million), but that doesn’t mean that a large percentage of them will automatically subscribe to a new offering, as we saw with Apple Music. Using the service (or any other service for that matter) without a user interface is a completely different experience than with one.

Is that worth the extra money per month? It will be interesting to see just how many of the estimated 60 million Prime members say, “Yes it is!”Īs stated before, the much lower $3.99 monthly price for Echo owners has a built in “gotcha” in that the service only works on that device, so once again, you have to wonder how many users will actually upgrade to the full service. There are a lot more songs available (Amazon will only say it's in the “tens of millions” as compared to Prime Music’s two million), there are curated playlists, behind-the-scenes artist commentaries, and a new app.

To be fair, Amazon Music Unlimited is different from Prime Music in a number of ways. And, as a Prime member, you already have Amazon’s Prime Music service available to you for free, so why would you want to pay the extra 8 bucks a month for something that you’ve already paid for? You have to be an Amazon Prime member in order to have access to the $7.99 price, and this is after you’ve already paid $99 for your Amazon Prime subscription for the year. The problem is that this price is really a mirage.
