Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- The free Amazon Prime music library now includes all 100 million songs included with the paid Music Unlimited service.
- However, without signing up for Music Unlimited, you won’t be able to play specific songs or albums in their intended order.
- High-fidelity tracks and spatial audio are also still locked behind the $9 Music Unlimited plan.
If you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber, you likely know that you’ve had access to a small collection of music for free. Using Amazon’s apps for various platforms, you could listen to this collection ad-free as much as you like.
Today, though, Amazon is expanding that available library (via The Verge). Now, the Amazon Prime music you’ll have access to includes over 100 million songs. That’s the entire library included with Amazon’s paid Spotify rival known as Music Unlimited.
However, that doesn’t mean you can immediately cancel Spotify. Without paying for Music Unlimited, the big catch here is that you cannot play specific tracks or listen to albums in their intended order. In other words, you can only hit “shuffle” on any artist, album, or playlist.
Additionally, you can’t listen to the Amazon Prime music library in high-fidelity or using spatial audio. For those features, you’ll still need a Music Unlimited subscription, which costs $9 each month.
Still, you need to count this as a win. Yesterday, you had access to a comparatively small library with your annual Prime membership. Now you have access to pretty much every song on every streaming platform without ads. The fact that you’re stuck only using the shuffle button isn’t ideal, but this is still better than you had it yesterday.
Additionally, Amazon is now offering a ton of podcasts ad-free for Amazon Prime subscribers. These include podcasts from Wondery (which Amazon owns) as well as podcasts from NPR, CNN, ESPN, and The New York Times.
