Inside Amazon-dot-com

At some point while we were all sleeping, Amazon launched Prime Music, through which users can stream unlimited tracks from Amazon’s music catalog. This all, no doubt, in preparation for their upcoming smart phone release. Don’t get too excited—Amazon’s music catalog can boast around 1 million songs—and that’s about it. Music streaming competitors’ numbers are more in the 20-30 million range for, well, not an increased price to match that ratio.  Music industry critic Bob Lefsetz warns that the move is a step even further backwards from current music-streaming models via Apple and Spotify that take large percentages of profits from rights holders and musicians. The payment model is unclear, selection limited, and could turn out to be, as Lefsetz is quick to call it, “a disaster.”  He suggests that Competitors will only see an increase in users. The imperfect attempt at a music streaming service has larger repercussions. If Amazon hopes to have a successful smart pho...

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 sin...