Amazon Prime Music sneaks in with ad-free streaming and a focus on curation

Amazon Prime Music
It's not a huge library, but it's a start

It's official - Amazon has entered the music streaming arena. Amazon Prime Music has now gone live, offering Prime customers over 1 million songs to stream.

Right now, the service is just available in the US (we're chasing Amazon to see when everyone else will get it) and offers ad-free streaming, curated playlists and unlimited offline playback

Prime Music works on iOS, Android, PC and Mac, and you'll have no cap on the number of times you can play any song. It's also hitting users with a bunch of curated "Prime Playlists", which have been put together by Amazon's editorial.

If you're an existing Prime customer you'll get instant access for no extra cost. If you're not, there's a 30 day free trial available.

Golden oldies

We're hearing reports that Amazon's catalog only features songs older than six months, which confirms one of the more recent rumours about the service. Its 1 million-strong library doesn't quite compare to Spotify's 20 million tracks though.

The odd thing is, Amazon hasn't actually made an official announcement regarding Prime Music yet - it just quietly put it live - so we expect it to go public about the service later today.

And what's that? Just a week ahead of the launch of the Amazon phone? What great timing.

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Hugh Langley

Hugh Langley is the ex-News Editor of TechRadar. He had written for many magazines and websites including Business Insider, The Telegraph, IGN, Gizmodo, Entrepreneur Magazine, WIRED (UK), TrustedReviews, Business Insider Australia, Business Insider India, Business Insider Singapore, Wareable, The Ambient and more.

Hugh is now a correspondent at Business Insider covering Google and Alphabet, and has the unfortunate distinction of accidentally linking the TechRadar homepage to a rival publication.