Amazon Music Unlimited: Can it make you leave your streaming service?

Amazon launched its music streaming service Music Unlimited in France last Friday. Does he have the means to make you leave Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer or Qobuz? Everything is not just catalog and subscription.

Amazon Music: a new one in an already loaded offer

Amazon Music Unlimited allows you to listen to unlimited streaming music from a catalog of millions of titles for 9 dollar per month or up to 5 users for 14 dollar per month. Does it remind you of something? This is normal, that's exactly what all the other audio streaming services offer.
The Unlimited offer complements a service that already stores personal music for online listening, as well as digital versions of most physical albums purchased on CDs or vinyl via its Amazon account. Amazon Prime subscribers are entitled to an annual subscription saving them two months.
                                         




The question arises: is this enough to tackle its current streaming service, whether it be Spotify, Deezer, Google Play Music, Apple Music, Qobuz or Tidal? If, I swear, there are really people who have subscribed to Tidal. After all, if I subscribe to Amazon Prime, and it does not bother me to line up 99 or 145 dollar in a row, that's interesting, is not it?

Not necessarily. In fact, I want to say it depends on your use of a streaming service. From the time I spent with the web interface and the Amazon Music mobile app, frankly, the experience is quite pleasant. There are even some good ideas like the read controls allowing to pass from one piece to another by simple scanning (with even a nice haptic return, at least on iPhone 7). The catalog looks full, and we find a good part of its physical Amazon Amazon shopping in digital version, which is always appreciable.

The value of recommendations

But what makes you stay on one service or another? Personally, two things: compatibility with the devices I use in the mobile and in the living room, and the use that is made of the catalog. Because a streaming service is like a big media library. You enter the building, you have access to millions of works, and it is exhilarating, but what is listening?


To this question, most of the existing services provide personalized answers that are more or less interesting. There is the "let our specialists" approach advocated by Qobuz and its high quality sound quality, but also by Apple Music, taking again one of the assets of the service bought at Beats.

Based on the premise that an algorithm will never have the knowledge of a musicologist or a rock critic, the approach of these services is interesting for users who want to discover things in the historical sense. What are the best known lesser pieces of David Bowie? The best songs produced by Brian Eno? A robot can release a list but it will not have the flavor of the selection made by a specialist of the artists in question.


Conversely, Spotify relies on its algorithms. And it must be admitted that for the generation that lives in the idea of ​​flow, the one who continually wonders "what do I listen after that? ", The Discoveries of the Week playlist hit the mark. The discoveries are as if someone brought you, every week, a selection of titles that you are almost sure to love, because if other people who share your tastes, that will be your case too. As long as you use Spotify in a sufficiently assiduous way, it is very rare that the selection swings you something completely out of your musical tastes or that you already know. Or in any case you have already listened to on the service.

Since then, the playlist has been supplemented by another version, the Radar of the outputs. Same principle but centered on the novelties of the week. And once you have tasted this little weekly pleasure, it is obviously difficult to do without it, or to switch to another service where all this history would have to be redone.

Amazon Music: a still unexploited potential?

Amazon Music Unlimited has great potential on this side: using your purchase history, there's plenty to create a nice graphic and send you perfectly calibrated recommendations. On the other hand, if a giant has the means to pay specialists on any kind of musical genre, it is the one who has aligned the tickets to debauche the presenters of Top Gear. Unfortunately, this potential is not well exploited at this time, as the Recommendations section offers only random titles, and playlists are very generic. The addicts to personalized selections will thus pass their way for now, but the proposal of 50 million titles for 8 dollars per month for Premium subscribers remains interesting.