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Comment by gfiorav | Hacker News Reader

Big surprise for me is Amazon music... with 13%!

I don't know anyone that uses it. Maybe it's a regional thing?

It's free with Prime and cheaper than other alternates for the paid version if you have Prime. For casual listening it's not bad at all.

It also supports so called HD and Ultra HD, which I believe Spotify still doesn't support, while Apple does.

It is not free with Prime, just $2 cheaper ($8 vs $10/mo).

I think what is driving Amazon Music subscriptions is the proliferation of Echo devices. It is easy to auto-subscribe from the speaker itself (sometimes too easy, to the point of being accidental), e.g. when you ask it to play a song.

>It is not free with Prime, just $2 cheaper

There's a free tier Amazon Music of 2 million songs included with Prime membership. That's the free music streaming my friend was using for 5+ years. She then upgraded to Amazon Music Unlimited for extra $80/year.

Can't tell if the article's 13% for Amazon Music is counting the free tier users.

In that case every Prime member is a subscriber, and that number should be a lot larger.

Nah, I'm a Prime subscriber and get the occasional email from Amazon that i have an unused advantage from my subscription and should enable Amazon Music.

As sibling comment also noted, there is a free tier that we've been using forever.

They also have a much cheaper option for students, I think $1/month or something like that.

Not sure if every Prime user uses Amazon Music, and how they count their user base.

What is the meaning of HD and ultra HD for music?

I'm sure it is just a marketing term that they've come up with.

https://www.amazon.com/music/unlimited/why-hd

HD: 'CD quality audio (aka, “lossless”)'

Ultra HD: 'Better than CD quality audio (up to 24 bit, 192 kHz)'

Does Apple or Spotify have some sort of extra feature over Amazon that would appeal to non-casual listeners?

I had Apple for a bit, switched over to Amazon because of the Prime discount... while I'm aware that morally I should de-Amazon my life, the service is pretty convenient.

For me, Spotify is everywhere. It works on Google Home, Echo, Xboxes, PC, Linux, Android, etc.

For quite a while, Google Music wouldn't work on Echo devices and Amazon Music wouldn't work on Google Home. Spotify worked everywhere, had native applications, and a decent value for a family plan.

Interesting. I've got Linux, Windows, and iOS here. The main annoyance of Amazon is that they don't appear to have a native client for Linux. At least not in my repo. I don't really mind the web interface, the higher bitrates are limited to the native client for some silly reason.

As it is... I just end up plugging my phone into my dac/amp as a (pretty stupid, IMO) workaround.

Long term, Spotify and Netflix are in trouble. Amazon and Apple are in this space, and they can use their trillion dollar market caps to decimate single-revenue stream companies.

The Department of Justice should do something about this. Neither Amazon nor Apple should be in these businesses. They do too much and apply price pressure unfairly.

If this continues, $1T+ tech will be the entire economy.

Netflix, Spotify, and all of the other "little companies" should sue the ever-loving bejesus out of these monsters for anti-competitive practices.

Increased competition is a good thing. I’m glad several companies are in this space.

It’s only a problem if a single provider is a monopoly and uses that to squeeze out other companies in order to raise prices. We’re very far off from that because there are so many companies competing and none of them control the market.

> It’s only a problem if a single provider is a monopoly and uses that to squeeze out other companies in order to raise prices.

The giants behave different to monopolies in the past.

Amazon makes its catalogs available for free, which makes businesses like Netflix and their offerings look expensive. They subsidize the costs using revenues from different business units, which is not only unfair, it's not actually competition.

It's not even necessarily about money. Giants care about attracting and keeping people on their platform.

Once actual healthy businesses dry up, revenues paid to creatives will go down. They've already begun picking apart other studios and assimilating their businesses, and this will only accelerate.

> Increased competition is a good thing.

Not when music, movies, and art become just features of the tech giant platforms. It dumbs everything down and ensures the tech giant opinions are the ones that get amplified.

I agree with you, which is why I subscribe to Netflix and Spotify, but man...

- Netflix's so-so content while being costlier

- And Spotify push to have podcasts instead of decent radio are not helping...

Spotify is trying to add new revenue streams and revenue growth.

Netflix is fighting content being taken away - they didn't have their own, and now content owners realize the value of their catalogs. There are also lots of new players (HBO, Disney, Peacock, Amazon, Apple). Once Netflix builds a bigger catalog, they can relax and curate better.

Amazon and Apple don't have these problems. They can purchase studios to artificially build their catalogues. If they weren't buying content, Netflix would be paying less. In fact, Netflix would probably be the beneficiary of studio consolidation if the giants were not writing checks too.

Spotify and Netflix don't have a grocery store or hardware business unit to help speed up investments.

It's vastly unfair to have horizontally scaled command of several industries, especially when they have built in synergies you can abuse.

netflix: costlier so-so content AND a soul crushingly annoying interface. I am 100% sure that I will never want to watch the vast majority of the items available, and yet I must scroll past them over and over and over in four to ten different rows during the same session even.

Spotify owns 50% of Tencent Music (pretty much Chinese Spotify). Tencent owns 20% of Universal Music Group, and a few percent of Warner Music as well.

They're all connected; you have that illusion of choice, and no matter what you pick, everyone wins (yay)!

Lots of Amazon music, in addition to Prime usage, is probably used with Alexa as well as that is the default music player on Alexa/Echo.

Just like Siri/Homepod uses Apple Music and "Hey Google" / Google Home/Helper uses Google Play/Youtube music.

My wife and I share a single Spotify account, so when she's listening, I switch to the free tier of Amazon Music. I wonder if that counts toward that 13%?

There is a couples account option and I think its very close to the same price of a single sub.

Edit: its called Spotify Duo and its $12.99 vs $9.99 https://www.spotify.com/us/premium/#plans

We subscribe simply because it is the only service that works on family plans without any friction on Echo devices. Tried to get Pandora and Spotify to work, but there was always a problem or the skill would fall apart over a period of months.

Does Amazon give out Music accounts as a bonus when users subscribe to some other service, similar to Amazon Prime customers getting streaming? Maybe that can account for incidental and not intentional subscribers.

Yes they do. Prime comes with a limited version that "only" has a couple million songs. At least in some countries. They also have a higher tier called Music Unlimited that's more on-par with the other guys content wise but cheaper if you already sub to Prime. Also have a tier that only works on Echos but gives access to the larger catalog for even less.

I switched to just using the included service with Prime. It's good enough for me and I get Prime super cheap as a student.

Some purchases on Amazon come with "3 months of amazon music", which surely adds to their numbers.

I'm under the impression that Amazon Music is US-only. It's decent if you're heavily invested in the Amazon Echo / Alexa ecosytem.

Anecdotal but my parents use the one integrated in prime because they mainly listen to old music.

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