1. Given my listening habits, the library feels limited. Tried searches for the three albums I listened to the most this month (http://www.last.fm/user/labibrahman/charts):

  Sylvan Esso - Sylvan Esso
  Chet Faker - Built on Glass
  Tycho - Awake

None are available for streaming. For a standalone service, this would be damning. As one of the perks offered with Prime this has the potential to become a compelling part of the package.

2. Amazon's store interface is not well suited for consuming media. I tried watching a few episodes of Friday Night Lights on the service instead of Netflix. Spoilers in episode descriptions meant that I had to very specifically control where I let my eyes over the UI. Next episodes don't auto play. Perhaps most annoyingly, there isn't a standalone URL I could go to for my streaming needs. To watch an episode I had to carry out the following steps:

  Navigate to amazon.com
  Search for Friday Night Lights
  Skim the results to click on the TV show
  Remember what season I was on
  Skim the episode descriptions while avoiding spoilers
  Click to stream, and make sure I don't accidentally click
  on the 1-click buy button which is annoyingly right next
  to the stream button.

My flow on Netflix:

  Navigate to netflix.com
  Click on the continue watching pane on top left corner of my screen.

I want Amazon to be a legitimate competitor in the space, but running everything through the store interface is killing any chance of me using Prime as a media consumption service.

3. I suspect that this works many orders of magnitude better on the Kindle Fire line of devices and that's great for people who already own Kindle Fires. If I don't already own one though, the Prime ecosystem should be driving to make that purchase and right now it is failing at that task.

The UX for this is very awkward (unless I'm missing something) - the "store" and the "player" are completely disjoint experiences with only a few marketing links between them. You can't actually add new (free) "Prime Music" to your collection from the player - you have to jump to the "store" to discover the music you want and add it to your cloud library. Nor can you play full songs from the "store", even if you have Prime and they are free - you are limited to 30 second samples.

The amazing thing about Rdio and Spotify, and what makes streaming services different than their MP3 purchasing predecessors, is that you can think "I want to listen to Kanye", type "Kanye" in to the search bar, press enter and listen. Amazon is making this whole process very awkward by adding a "buy" step (even if no money is changing hands).

The reason that Spotify is disruptive isn't that the music is paid for via subscription pricing - it's that it eliminates the distinction between "music I own" and "all of the music ever recorded".

This is seriously a usability disaster. I have to go through the normal Amazon store to add music to my prime library? I have to leave the player to find music to listen to? No thank you.

Well this product is dead on arrival

http://i.imgur.com/hBVq7pp.png

Prime subscriber here. Cool beans. I found some of my favorites.

But I also found a lot of spammy crap. I searched for Smashing Pumpkins, and it's pages of "1979 [A Tribute to the Smashing Pumpkins]" or "Disarm [In The Style Of The Smashing Pumpkins]". It takes some work to figure out, no, they don't actually have them.

I'm reminded of Steve Jobs's line with the introduction of the iTMS:

"This number [of songs] could have easily been much higher, if we wanted to let in every song. But we realize record companies do a great service. They edit!"

Here's hoping they can grow their library, but in the meantime, please don't give me piss when I search for rain.

Note that this only applies to US Amazon Prime accounts.

If you are an Amazon Prime customer in another region, Amazon will ignore that and ask you to start another Amazon Prime subscription. But I doubt your second Prime account will actually come with any of the advertised benefits.

Which, for an international company with accurate knowledge of my billing address, is misleading and hamfisted.

Isn't anyone interested in owning their music anymore? Have we all become such casual consumers of music that the concept of building a permanent library of music they like is unnecessary?

I will never understand the appeal of subscription music services.

The classical collection seems to be small. For example, 24098 out of 658027 (3.7%) pop albums are prime, but only 894 of 171251 (0.5%) classical albums are prime. I expected the other way (wishfully, as a fan of classical music), that older less popular music is cheaper to be made prime for Amazon. Strange.

Wow. This is outstanding. Amazon is solidly developing a one-stop centralized base of entertainment. Even more enticing is that it's free with prime, and even if you don't have prime, it's worth getting prime for: a small fee for a year's access to most music/films you could want. And then you have prime, which makes it much more enticing to buy products on Amazon (due to cheaper, faster delivery). Smart.

(I am aware that Amazon's music library is currently not as large as that of its competitors. I think it is reasonable to assume that this will change in the near future.)

The more significant thing to note here is that the general trend in online businesses (obvious examples will include Google, Apple, and Facebook) is that every business is trying to create its own walled garden --- they try to provide all the services that any user could need, such that the user would not do business with any competitors, and so the user would interface with the business as much as possible. Apple did a remarkably good job at this with iTunes back in the day --- they were the first to provide access to a massive online store of entertainment and to integrate it very heavily with their products.

Amazon, however, is taking the cake in this respect. Their products are extremely well-integrated: www.amazon.com is gradually becoming a one-stop-destination for most media and for general shopping. Perhaps this is due to Amazon's perseverance: I've never seen Amazon weaken its hold on a particular share of any market.

Seems like the library is a little limited. As of tonight (2014-06-11 23:19 PST), two of the top songs on Rdio and Spotify are "Problem' by Ariana Grande and "Fancy" by Iggy Azalea. Neither are available on Prime Music, only for purchase on the normal MP3 Store. I suppose the advantage is a lot of people already have Prime, but I don't see any reason to jump ship from either Rdio or Spotify for this.

If this can match spotify's catalog any time soon, AND be available as an app or (usable) mobile site, ad free: RIP music services. This is an enticing offer for those on the fence about prime, given that spotify premium is $120 a year. For the same price, you get prime, spotify, a bit of netflix/hulu (hopefully more to come on the video end).

Pretty brilliant move.

This has the same problems that I have with Prime Video:

1) The interface is rather horrid when compared to services in the same category, like Netflix. Others have already expounded on this though, so I won't waste the bytes.

2) I hate, hate, HATE being told I have access to all these movies/songs, only to find that the content I searched for isn't available to stream unless I pay extra money on top of the service I already have. Logically I say that it's better to have extra options- but I've never gotten as mad at Netflix for not having what I want to watch as I've gotten at Amazon for having what I want to watch, but needing to pay extra.

In addition to the music that's available via Prime, they have an "auto-rip" feature that automatically adds to your music library any tracks from physical CDs that you've purchased from Amazon in the past. Very nice.

It costs $10 per month for on-demand streaming of 16 million songs in Rhapsody. By that calculation, this offer would cost $7.5 annually. So it's a smart move for Amazon to lure people to Prime by sacrificing small fraction of revenue.

I'm a user of Rhapsody for almost 13 years now and love it not having to buy individual 100s of artists I listen to. Amazon's 1 million song collection is peanuts for me but for most others it might be enough. I see we are now only few months away from true commoditization of music business (i.e. pay monthly subscription to use all you want like electricity and water).

Limited selection like Prime Instant Video, but at least it's available on Android (although the app doesn't seem to support the new service yet and is butt-ugly). On a side note, I don't really get why Amazon is twisting our arms and doesn't offer Instant Video on Android outside of Google TV and Kindle Fire. I care less about their free videos, but I've purchased digital content and I'm not able to watch it on my Android tablet. Do they really think they can make me buy Kindle Fire just for that?

I am a USA prime account holder with an account that was renewed in January of this year (2014). I was curious why the amazon prime music page indicated I needed to upgrade my account, so, I clicked 'upgrade for 99 dollars'.

It went ahead and renewed my prime account with today's date, and sent me a new welcome email.

It's completely unclear if it has consumed my previous subscription with over half a year left.

So be cautious... probably I did not read enough!

> Over a million songs and hundreds of playlists.

This line reads like it's by Rhapsody in 2002.

I was actually pretty excited about this because they happen to have a lot of music I listen to (electronic). I loaded up about two dozen albums and downloaded their Android MP3 app. Tried to play a track and was told the track was no longer Prime eligible. The whole album grayed out and when accessed says "We're sorry but this album is no longer available in Amazon's catalog".

Searched for a number of things unsuccessfully then found that Neil Young is on it. Okay, tried to play "Harvest" and it refused. The previews for the same album work, but only after letting the Flash widget run (I use flashblock). The Prime videos use Silverlight, so that was never an issue. I can't find a widget hiding anywhere for the prime music, so I'm guessing that's a bug on their part. Or maybe I have it all wrong. Not going to waste time debugging their issues.

Has anyone tried the amazon lending library? Absolute rubbish. At least this has Neil Young, but the problem is, you have to have nearly everything for it to work. And also you're competing with this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8odlwI94uFA

It was smart for Amazon to increase the price of Prime right before launching music streaming. :p

This is another case (IMHO) of Amazon being a "Jack of all trades, King of none". Prime delivery is awesome, they are king in that arena but video/music is seriously lacking in the UI/UX department.

They have decent content for free on Instant Video but it doesn't keep track of what you have watched and navigating is a massive PITA. Their music selection is sparse and that's me being kind... I paused my Spotify to check out their OS X app and couldn't believe how terrible it is. Search is confusing and navigating my library is not intuitive at all.

I will keep an eye on it but they should not have released it in this state.

I like the idea, but it seems to be poorly executed with the absolutely-dismal selection of Prime-eligible music. Good albums missing, good songs missing, even entire artists missing (even ones that were at one point pretty mainstream; Sublime, for example).

Amusingly, when searching for "Let It Go", I ended up with virtually every song titled "Let It Go" that's not sung by Idina Menzel (speaking of which, the only Idina Menzel songs available are from Glee, and there are a whole two of them that are actually sung by Idina Menzel). Disney's probably to blame for that one, but still.

Wooohooo, yet another amazon prime thing that isn't offered to Canadians. Considering we pay more, get "2 day shipping" which is actually 3 days because Amazon cant' seem to do math, and get no other services, and Amazon prices are rarely something to get excited about here, well Amazon, we're done. I just cancelled my amazon prime account. Apple, Netflix, and Google figured out ways to get media to Canada, but Amazon decided to suck donkey nuts... again.

It is no better than their Amazon Instant Video. Their video offering is pretty terrible. Takes ages to move between menus. You cannot just continue from where you were previously. It doesn't skip the credits and offer the next episode. The whole thing is painful to use compared to Netflix.

Another example. Yesterday I was looking for a TV show I was watching. I went into "Your TV Shows" and it wasn't there. It had been pushed out by other shows I watched. Instead it appeared in "Recently Watched." It is so unintuitive.

I have a prime account. I wouldn't mind cancelling Netflix and Spotify but can't while the user experience offered by Amazon is so horrible.

Exactly. And, if you don't already have the Cloud Player application on your computer, you're shown nothing and told to sign up online. No link, no further explanation.

Okay, except you can't actually sign up online. Searching through Amazon and Google, you may eventually discover you need to download another application, which of course requires you to enter separate credit card information from that Amazon already has on file for your Prime membership, download a downloader, then use that to download the music application, which may finally allow you to sign up to use the service for which you are supposed to be already paying for (e.g. Prime).

I'd say that fairly well qualifies as the worst possible "new" user experience. I mean that quite literally; it appears to have been optimized at each and every step to be as bad as is possible given current limitations. Well played, Amazon; I expect total music dominance within the quarter.

What's scaring me is the ease of polluting my library: sure I want to listen to lots of free* music, but I also want to not dilute my paid-for collection of Good Stuff™ with Cheap Crap™ in the process. Same problem exists with e-books: good & paid content gets lost amid the briefly attractive titles downloaded by the hundreds (thousands?). Physical media at least forces you to address limited storage space by chucking/relocating the cruft.

(* - yes, it's $99/yr)

Casual consumers? Before Spotify, I basically only listened to music in my car, and then I just stuck the top 40 station on and dealt with the crap. Now, in 3 years on Spotify, I've listened to more than 10k distinct songs on 2.5k albums from 2k artists. I've gone from US top 40 to music from all around the world. In the last month, I have listened to artists from the US, Germany, Western Sahara, Ivory Coast, Mali, Senegal, Belgium, Sierra Leone, Brazil, Turkey, Norway, India and China. I've listened to new releases and music from artists who have been dead for 60 years. I've curated numerous playlists for myself and others, and have become known as someone with broad and unusual tastes. I am constantly seeking out new and interesting music. Basically, I've become obsessed.

Spotify has enabled a degree of discovery and curation that is simply not possible for anyone without access to an insanely good record store and/or really, really deep pockets. I cannot imagine any reason to ever go back. If Spotify ever goes under or removes an artists I really like, I can always buy it then. But until then, I will happily pay my $10/month and keep using Spotify as my sole source of music. Frankly, I think Spotify is the cheapest thing I have ever spent money on when compared to the value it provides.

Even if I could afford to own all my Spotify music, I would have to be responsible for backing it up and moving it between devices or into the cloud. So I would get less value for 10-100x more money. And this figure isn't even counting the value of the discovery service that Spotify provides. If I meet someone from halfway across the world, I can ask for musical recommendations, and then listen to them in my car on the way home.

Honestly, I don't understand how you can seriously explore music without Spotify.

But here's the thing. Back in the 80s and early 90s, I amassed a very large music collection on cassette. Some of it copied from friends, lots of it picked up from used record shops, and some even paid full price for. Some of the finest butt rock heavy metal ever produced was in that collection.

Then I bought a CD player and started building the collection again. Not surprisingly, the new collection contained different stuff. Not much at all overlapped with the old collection. When I moved, I didn't bother bringing the tapes (or the records that preceded them).

Now I have a pretty good collection of music on .mp3. Some of it is ripped from those old CDs, but a lot less than you'd think. Those CDs are in storage, somewhere, I think. Every once in a while I find a stack of them and do a kind of "yeah, hey, It's the motherf'ing D.R.E... Those were good times." before putting them back.

So I think the idea with subscription services is that they handle the case where your tastes change. If I were the king of guy that really wanted to keep blasting the same Judas Priest album that marked music's perfection back in 1987 today, I could see the point of hoarding music.

But then I'd probably need to go find another black Trans Am (yes, with T-tops & screaming eagle on the hood, just like the Bandit had) to blast it from.

Times change though, and people move on. For a guy with $10 a month in his pocket and the ability to put pragmatism ahead of sentimentality, streaming music services actually do make a lot of sense.

To buy the amount of music I listen to on Spotify would cost hundreds of pounds each month, so I prefer to subscribe for £10. I can still buy the obscure/local/unsigned music I want to listen to that isn't available on there.

To me the idea of owning music is tied to the need for physical media, which we don't have any more. We don't worry about owning TV shows for example because they weren't traditionally broadcast that way.

I totally hear you; I have around a half terabyte of albums (and complete discographies for my favorite artists), and I physically control the devices that actually store the bits, because that's how I like it.

But still, I fuck around with streaming services (the ones that work here in Japan, anyway) as a way to explore newer music -- the best of which ultimately ends up in my permanent collection.

You can do both.

You're not alone. My blood congeals at the idea that access to the music I love is somehow restricted by a third party with a different agenda to mine. I have zero interest in a third party streaming service. Now, if I could install my very own self-hosted Spotify-alike, stick all my music on there, and stream it to my devices with a smooth wireless connection that works even when I'm in tunnels, then you've got me as a streaming music customer.

Well, I don't really "own" my music in a legal sense, although I do own some licenses to music as well as some plastic discs and flash chips that store digital copies of music.

I do have the same intuition that you do that subscription music services are unsatisfying, but I think the line is starting to blur. I use iTunes almost exclusively as my music library, through iTunes Match and my own iTunes purchases. Other than the songs that happen to be cached on my devices, this is not physically any more permanent or "owned" than a subscription service like Spotify. Granted, I can download and backup music from iTunes, but that's an additional step that most people presumably don't do. (I do keep fairly recent backups of my music, and much of my especially cherished music is backed up from CDs, though I refuse to purchase physical media these days.)

I use Deezer (a music subscription service) and I get serious usage out of it. Sure, I don't own music anymore, but that's because it seems so unnecessary.

Do you really think so? I find Amazon Instant Video to be a distant also-ran to Netflix, and this music service is vastly inferior to literally every other one I have tried.

> I've never seen Amazon weaken its hold on a particular share of any market.

I can see AWS being squeezed by outfits like Digital Ocean and Linode on the low end and Google Compute/App Engine on the high end. Anecdotally, I used to run some servers on AWS but moved them to DO & Linode as they're cheaper, faster & simpler.