Amazon Music Adds 98M Songs & Ad-Free Podcasts To Take On Spotify… With A Catch

If you have Amazon Prime, you might have come across its Amazon Music section, which arrives with the main subscription and a small library of just two million songs. Though, in comparison to its dedicated music service Prime Unlimited, it doesn’t shine quite as brightly.
 

Amazon aims to attract customers to join the service by expanding the catalog to 100 million songs. However, there is a catch. The only way to listen to a song is through Shuffle, a music lover’s worst nightmare.

Nevertheless, the purpose of doing this was probably not to draw attention away from Amazon Prime Unlimited’s benefits, which are comparable to those of other music streaming services and cost US$8.95 per month.

While your ability to navigate the app may be restricted, you can still create playlists and download songs for offline listening. Still, is it worth having to Shuffle through an entire artist’s discography just to find that one song? 

If you’re already thinking you might skip giving this a try, that’s where its next newest addition comes in. Amazon Music is now bringing podcasts to its arsenal and keeping them ad-free.
 
This is a step above Spotify, which plays ads on podcasts even for customers who have paid for a subscription. 
 
On top of this, Amazon’s podcast service will also allow listeners a ‘Podcast Preview’, where you can listen to a short snippet before deciding if you like it. This could also be a great way of discovering new shows you might not have tried listening to before.
 
TechCrunch posits that this new update could be a way to show customers that the Amazon Prime subscription is still worth it after people commented that its recent price rise from US$119 to US$139 made it too expensive and not worth it anymore.
 
 
 
[via TechCrunch and Mashable, cover image via Amazon]