Amazon Launches Prime Music

By -
In an open letter to Amazon customers on its website (partial image shown on the right), Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos announced launch of Prime Music, referring toit as the "the newest benefit of Prime membership". 
The Prime Music allows Prime members to not only "listen ad-free to over a million songs", it allows them  to download those songs to their smartphones and Kindle devices to listen to them offline as well. It's different from other internet radio providers such as Pandora. 
The message from Jeff Bezos also emphasized, several times, how Prime Music comes with Prime Playlist removing "one more barrier — deciding what to listen to." Amazon recognizes the issue of over-choice, how selecting what songs to listen to from a million songs could be daunting, so it has arranged them into hundreds of Prime Playlists which are (supposedly) created by music experts have created for you.  
The message goes on to mention the list of popular singers artistsincludes Daft Punk, P!nk, Bruno Mars, Blake Shelton, The Lumineers, Bruce Springsteen and Madonna. 
The message mentioned that "Kindle Fire HD/HDX devices will get Prime Music in an automatic, over-the-air update" and  Prime members can "download the latest Amazon Music app in the Android and iOS appstores". The current Cloud Player allowed users to not only play mp3 music they had purchased from Amazon and saved it the cloud, it also allowed them to upload their own music purchased or downloaded elsewhere to enjoy. Looks like going forward,  Prime members will be able to listen to music from the large 1 million song prime collection in addition to the music they had purchased or uploaded to their Amazon cloud. 

Prime members can go to www.primemusic.com to listen to free music. 
Despite this announcement, Amazon stock price closed 2.77% down today. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Amazon's Fire Phone Misfires?

By -
Image
Last week, Amazon unveiled the much-anticipated or at least   much-hyped 3D smart phone,  following up with an email to all its customers introducing the phone with the slogan "The First Smartphone Designed by Amazon". That slogan sounds a bit strange since the Amazon brand is not associated with product design excellence so "the first blah designed by Amazon" does not really carry much weight with us - Amazon did pioneer the eBook reader business with Kindle and dominates it, but that's not because of its elegant design, more because of ready availability of the content at bargain prices, which in turn is based on  Amazon’s willingness to sell both the device and eBooks at a loss to gain market share.  Brilliant business strategy, perhaps, but IMHO, that does not set Amazon as a product design excellence star. All that slogan does is tell us that Amazon is not too proud to be (just) a company that efficiently operates warehouses and packs & deliv...
Read more

Amazon's Fire Dwindles

By -
Image
In its quarterly earnings announcement yesterday, Seattle based Amazon.com, the largest US eCommerce company, admitted that it has missed bith revenue and profit estimates for Q3, 2014. These disappointing third-quarter results see the online retailer’s shares at 9 percent lower than the 7 to 18 percent revenue growth that was originally forecasted. This loss has taken more than $15 billion off of Amazon’s market value (now at $144.7 billion) and seen their stock plummet 13 percent since the poor Q2 results announced in July. Amazon is reporting losses around $437 million resulting from failed product launches and various acquisitions and expansions that take the ecommerce company further and further away from their original charter and core competency. Amazon continues to invest heavily in hardware devices, expanding it to include a phone and dropping the word "Kindle" from their Tablet line of products, simplifying it to just Fire. However,  the hyped...
Read more

Amazon Asks KDP Authors to write to Hachette CEO, I wrote to both Jeff Bezos and Michael Pietsch instead

By -
Less than an hour ago, Amazon prompted KDP authors (like me) to write an email to  Hachette CEO, Michael Pietsch,  supporting their point of view in their negotiation with Hachette.   It's interesting on how Amazon is finally realizing that it's bullying tactics towards traditional media corporations that are already facing financial challenges are no longer working, and given the enormous size of Amazon, the public now views Amazon with suspicion and as the bully.  While in its email Amazon makes some valid points about how lower cost will actually increase the size of the business by increasing volume, it fails to mention that lowering prices of popular, top-rated eBooks will also result in increased sales of the Kindle devices, eventually allowing it to sell those devices at profit rather than selling them as a cost. This is called vertical competition, consumers have a annual budget for books in their mind and if eBooks are lot cheaper than books, then the br...
Read more