Amazon Working To Offer Free Music Streaming

Rumor has it that online retail giant Amazon will debut a free music service as early as next week. Like Spotify and Pandora, the music service will be ad-supported, according to sources at Billboard.

The music would be available on-demand through Amazon’s voice-activated Echo services. Can you say “Alexa, play free music?”

Right now, Amazon requires an Amazon Prime subscription to access Amazon Music. Prime memberships cost $119 a year. Amazon Music Unlimited, which is available to people who don’t have Prime memberships, costs $9.99 a month.

This isn’t Amazon’s first foray into a major industry outside its massive e-commerce business. In 2017, Amazon purchased the upscale grocery store chain Whole Foods for nearly $14 billion. According to CNN, Amazon is considering placing new Whole Foods markets in hundreds of empty Sears stores around the country.

Some critics are worried that Amazon’s free music platform could spell trouble for competitors like Spotify and Pandora, who don’t have the resources or ad revenue to compete with a behemoth company like Amazon. However, Spotify currently has 200 million users, while Amazon Music has only 16 million. Like Spotify and Pandora, Amazon’s free music service will require users to listen to commercials in order to play songs—so it won’t offer a respite from Spotify’s notoriously annoying commercials.