Amazon Prime Music (opens in new tab)

The standalone URL for the Amazon movie catalog is amazon.com/vod (for video on demand I suppose). That's both prime and non-prime shows.

The UI is a bit weaker now on the website than it used to be. Before it would gray out the episodes you've watched. Now they gray out the background, but only if you've seen enough of the episode for it to "count". There's also a light green bar showing your progress through the episode on the right hand side.

If you use streaming with an app, like the one on the Playstation, you can click on "Your TV Shows", and it will remember which season and episode you watched last. So I click on the show, and it remembers I'm on episode 10. Barring that I try to remember to keep the most reason season on my watchlist (since unlike Netflix, you can add a season to a watchlist rather than a show)

I agree the autoplay is slightly annoying. At best I've figured out there's a "skip" button in the UI to tell it to play the next, but that's still manual.

1 million songs don't sound like a lot; the total number of original songs is something around 20 millions, so 1M <= 5%

Besides, how do they decide what's free as prime and what isn't? My songs aren't free to stream for example

http://www.amazon.com/Bambax/dp/B00KB5NT6G/

but I wouldn't mind if they were; how do I opt in?

Edit: not 0.5 but 5%!

I had the same result looking for my recent most-played bands. From what I've found so far, the only artists I like for whom they have good coverage are Dave Matthews Band and Pearl Jam. So I guess you're in luck if you love the '90s.

Even the "popular artists" list that they're pimping on the front page is more striking for what's missing than what's there. They don't have the vast, vast majority of REM's discography (including "Automatic for the People"!), most of Pink's albums, anything by Cher besides "Believe", literally any of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' albums that you would have heard of (seriously, why are they even listed?), Shakira's "Laundry Service", "Oops!…I Did It Again" by Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake's second album — and that was just glancing around as I wrote this paragraph. The most confounding part is that there doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason to what they have or don't have.

> one of the perks offered with Prime

Just remember that the price of prime is going up $40 a year and part of that new $40/year you are paying is for this. As with many of the perks that Prime gets you it feels like it isn't very good, but it feels "free" so it is hard to complain much.

My fear would be that there are a lot of people that will be okay with Amazon Prime services that are not very good just because they got them for "free" thus stopping new companies from attempting to get in on the same market.

FWIW, they do have Tycho...

http://www.amazon.com/Awake-Tycho/dp/B00FSU5OFS/

It's even more weird: it's not albums that are available or not, it's individual songs. An album I've been listening to while I work out: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004ZTL5Q0/ref=sr_1_1_rd?ie...

Blast Tyrant by Clutch. 3 songs from the original album plus one more from the extended album. This isn't an album where there's only two or three good songs, they're all solid gold if you like the genre. And I certainly wouldn't pick The Regulator as one of the top three songs; Ghost feels very similar but IMO has more going for it. So how did The Regulator get picked?

--I must have pissed someone off because I feel I'm being followed around and all of my posts downvoted for no reason at all. Please explain.

Also no subtitle support.

But it does remember what episode you are on, the ones that are bold are ones you haven't seent.

> Next episodes don't auto play.

There are actually some very strict legal requirements preventing streaming-video services from providing "linear content" (i.e. anything that works like a TV channel.) Anyone that seems to do so (e.g. Netflix) still stops every few episodes to get you to press a button to continue.

Happily, this is entirely irrelevant to within-home streaming. Plex can auto-play for as long as you like.

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)

Their iOS app seems to be a much better experience than the web site, where I kept getting accidentally shunted to the "digital music" department where the prime music wasn't highlighted.

The Amazon store UI is poorly suited for this task.

Additionally, the player URL (http://cloudplayer.amazon.com) prompts me to install Flash, something I've been unwilling to do for years now.

I can't believe they launched something this big with that UI. If they had an app comparable to that of Spotify on mobile and desktop, so many people would have jumped right on it.

>I have to leave the player to find music to listen to?

You don't. cloudplayer.amazon.com -> type in search -> look at right-hand side.

I just discovered that as well. And it just so happens that 3 of the songs by the artist I wanted were all non-prime. Very lame.

Interesting. While I'm finding albums and artists to be a bit scarce, the ones I've been testing (so far Barenaked Ladies and the Crash Test Dummies) haven't had that issue of only some songs being free.

But I thought keeping record companies as the gatekeepers was bad?

I'd rather I decide for myself if I like a song or not and not a corporate business decision maker decide for me before I have a chance to hear it.

Same reason I prefer iBooks over Kindle: the store is sensibly curated, not polluted with vague resemblances, knock-offs, and (worst) proliferation of really bad OCR conversions.

Got surprised as well to see that they were proposing me subscribe to Prime when I have been a Prime member for more than a year. Realised that I was on the US website, and the music streaming does not seem to be accessible for UK customers.

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.

Isn't the classical also cheaper to license?

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.

For the price, this is a really good deal. However, some people (like me) have over 200+ spotify playlists with over 100 songs, and 20+ ones that I actively use.

If they want to capture spotify's market share, just having a large enough catalog wouldn't cut it. They need a easy way to convert the spotify library into their apps.

The catalog isn't there yet. I'm getting about a 50% hit rate on assorted genres from a variety of artists that I don't feel are particularly obscure, stuff that Pandora plays for me and Spotifiy has in their catalog.

Hopefully this changes and Amazon can add even more value to my Prime subscription.

Interesting, I've have had the exact opposite experience for #2. If there's a movie, or TV show that I want to watch I'd rather pay $5 to watch it than just be told it's not available. This has had such a strong effect on me that if there's something in particular I want to watch I go to Amazon before Netflix simply because I know I will more likely have an option to watch what I want (even if it costs money). Personally I feel like Netflix has back themselves into a corner by only having one all-inclusive price level.

That said the part about Amazon that infuriates me is when they have the movies available but not for rent and only offer the pay $15 to own option. Also the Netflix discovery/browse is experience is light years better than Amazon's.

Sometimes the price for the CD's with auto-rip is cheaper than the MP3 only price. Quite strange.

This is most interesting for me. They are deliberately withholding an android app for streaming video, but they are dipping their toes in with streaming music.

My edit expired - Here is the deal. A person can share Amazon Prime with other people - family, friends, etc - but the primary benefits such as this music are available to only the primary email address holder. So when I said 'upgrade account', even though the Verify Prime indicated Active, it was not active for music. The upgrade button instantly charges 99 dollars.

I would ask support about that, Amazon seems to be usually adept at handling such service calls. They handled our complaints in the past that were similar to this quite nicely.

Tried it on Chrome/Linux. Audio appears to be played through a flash plugin (noted since I have "click to enable plugins" set). Checking the debugger, the service seems to use HTTP Live Streaming/m3u8 with 10-second, 400k mp2ts chunks.

Digging a touch further, chunks are apparently encoded to 256-kbps AAC, and their URLs can be captured and replayed for up to an hour. Reconstituting tracks, then, is as simple as catting all the chunks together and running them through libav.

I'm sure there are much easier ways to make unauthorized copies of music, but this actually seems fairly unprotected, though obviously not 'open', since it's using a flash-based player.

Do feel so bad. My amazon.de account in Germany also does not have this "prime" feature.

They'll probably run it at a loss until they have the subscriber numbers to make profit.

As long as they get usable web/phone/xbox apps this will kill Spotify.

I just went through my current Spotify playlist and everything was on there. I'll try it over the next few days. This may be it for Spotify.

Sigur ros wasn't available.

It is interesting to see Amazon enter the ring with Google and Apple on the phones and music market. A few years ago I don't think I would have entirely believed it. But I guess that's why I don't do any investing outside of index funds!

What kind of monthly mobile data usage will this application entail? iTunes is geared toward the model of "download, then listen on the go" with the option of cellular streaming. Amazon Music seems the reverse, geared toward cellular streaming, with some caching. The service certainly provides the phone with the feature of free mobile music, but at the cost ($?) of significantly increased consumption of one's data plan.

What exactly did you think "Free with Amazon Prime." meant?

"Free with Amazon Prime" makes this very clear. No tricks, just plain English.

"Free with purchase" is common marketing terminology.

You didn't expect a ginormous retailer would just give away millions of products for absolutely free (ad-free, no subscription, no cost whatsoever), did you?