Amazon Launches New 'Music Unlimited' Service, Starts At $4/Month For Use On Just One Echo

Speaking of giant ecommerce companies, Amazon has launched a streaming music service dubbed, Amazon Music Unlimited, that starts at $3.99 (cheaper than Spotify or Apple Music) and has tens of millions of songs. There's a catch, however. The service has three payment tiers, but the lowest one -- which again, costs $3.99 -- only works with company's Amazon Echo, or Echo Dot, or Amazon Tap speakers. GeekWire adds: To use Amazon Music Unlimited on multiple devices, including smartphones, you'll need to pay $7.99 if you're an Amazon Prime member, or $9.99 if you're not. In a world where people increasingly expect everything to work everywhere, the Echo-only tier might seem out of place, even at less than $4 a month. But Amazon is pitching the option as an add-on experience for Echo owners, going beyond the 2 million tracks available in the existing Amazon Prime Music service that comes with the $99/year Amazon Prime subscription. The company is also using some smart computing behind the scenes to differentiate the experience. For example, Echo users will be able to ask Alexa to "play the new song by Adele."

I miss Live365

[Snotnose]

Subscribed to it for a decade, had a sad when it closed down. Now I just listen to CDs, depending on reviews to let me guess what I might like.

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[kamapuaa]

Awesome story grandpa!

Pay for eavesdropping!

[DogDude]

Yes, pay for eavesdropping! Do it! Just think: instead of having to deal with those "complicated" digital audio files, you can pay one of the world's largest international corporations to record everything happening in your household, day and night! What a deal!

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[Anonymous Coward]

"Doesn't have to be on all the time." Also, it provides an operational capability to whoever controls the device. Do you know all the ways it can be controlled? Nobody does, not even the guys who designed it.

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[ziggr]

I already pay my cellphone provider for Eavesdropping-as-a-Service. Plus my cellphone features location tracking and camera surveillance features that Echo hardware lacks.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Except that your smartphone has a dedicated piece of hardware listening for the activation phrase. Your battery would drop faster than a Samsung battery explodes if it was surveilling you like an Echo.

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[DRJlaw]

Except that your smartphone has a dedicated piece of hardware listening for the activation phrase. Your battery would drop faster than a Samsung battery explodes if it was surveilling you like an Echo.

Funny, that's how the Echo works as well. [washingtonpost.com]

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[101percent]

They're also super secret with their datacenters, which adds to the creep factor.

Or, I could just listen to the radio...

[mark-t]

Ads and all... at least it's free to listen to.

God I miss MP3.com

[rsilvergun]

and not the one that let me pirate crap, but the one that introduced me to Power Quest, Dragonforce, Labyrinth and the couple of tracks that came out of Frostweaver before they disappeared. I miss there being a viable alternative to the RIAA's mafioso.

For a while E-Music worked great, but they got big in Europe and jacked up their prices to silly levels. Now if I want to listen to a band I've gotta buy the CD. That's fine for something I already know I like, but it took a long time for In Flames to grow

Music Unlimited

[HideyoshiJP]

So.. they never heard of Sony's old Music Unlimited [wikipedia.org]?