What you need to know
- Amazon now has almost as many paying subscribers as Apple Music, with the firm citing nearly 55 million subs in comparison to Apple's 60 million.
- Amazon's growth has been buoyed by savvily offering a bevy of paid options, with different price ranges for different wallet sizes.
- The firm sees the U.S., Japan, the UK, and Germany as its strongest markets.
Amazon might be your shopping center and library right now, but it's also more likely than not to be in the running as your next home DJ.
Amazon Music has now acquired over 55 million users, with nearly all of them being paying customers according to a report from the Financial Times. The retail giant has been working on building out its music offerings, offering a number of price increments to capture as broad an audience as possible. Apple, in contrast, has 60 million users. Spotify sits in a class of its own as the market leader with 248 million paying subscribers and 144m of them being paid.
Amazon Music is the one streaming service you shouldn't ignore
Music streaming services are something we take for granted, and for good reason too. They're a lot of them, and mostly interchangeable in content. What matters most is that service providers are able to meet customers where their wallets are.
YouTube Music, despite not doing well in western markets, learned that lesson in India. Amazon, the master of pricing its way into market dominance, appears to have applied that lesson to its own service. Pay one price for an all you can eat Amazon Music subscription, get a little but off if you only want to stream on an Echo Speaker, get a little more off if you've already got Prime, and hey presto, you've got yourself a deal.
For what it's worth, it seems to be working.
Which Amazon Music subscription should you get?
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