Amazon Launches Streaming Music Service

The site that has everything just added a new feature as Amazon.com has launched its own streaming music service to compete directly with Apple's Beats Music service, Pandora, Spotify and the like. Available for Amazon Prime members, the service offers unlimited access to over one million ad-free songs either online or offline. By making it available to "Prime" members, the service automatically has more customers than Beats Music but that does not necessarily mean members will use Amazon's service over the many others that are available.

For those that do use the service, choices of customized playlists or pre-selected playlists are available but the service only has songs that are six months or older--likely to avoid the costs of licensing newer music. Amazon has also renamed its Amazon Cloud Player app to, simply, Amazon Music.

[Amazon]