Life

Prime Music?

I got to reading this review of the Amazon Prime Music offering that’s been included with Amazon Prime for a while. I’ve spent the last 5-days or so trying out the service, and have to say, overall I’m pretty disappointed.

I had always assumed, perhaps wrongly, that Prime Music was the function that allowed me, in most cases, to buy a CD album and be able to download the “Auto-rip” version, for less than buying the digital MP3 version alone. Otherwise that service makes no sense. Except I’m sure there is some arcane music industry tracking/licensing reason.

It turns out that Amazon Prime Music is a pseudo streaming service, ala Spotify, Pandora etc. So I thought worth trying. I’d already installed the Amazon Music app on my Windows Media Center (WMC) PC, that way any download or auto-rip albums can go straight onto the NAS based music server and be available to stream around the house.

Another big benefit of Prime Music, is it keeps track of what you buy, and allows you to add (Prime only) tracks and albums to your Amazon music collection, which you can stream mixed with your purchased music, or download and play offline. Want to listen for free to The Beatles – Abbey Road, offline, but don’t want to buy it? Amazon Prime Music lets you do that.

In summary, I would say it’s a great way to listen to very specific albums(provided they are available free). As I write the 3x CD version of Oasis (What’s the story) Morning Glory? is streaming in its entirety to the WMC, which it turn is playing streaming it around the house using wifi to players in each room.

They have a lot of back catalogue material, which is good, plus some timely new material. After the Superbowl on Sunday, we streamed the Justin Timberlake “Man of the Woods“. It’s also good for streaming commercial-free, top-50, original artist, playlists, and curated playlists, like this one, 50 Great Songs from the Last 10 Years, but on most other stuff I’d give it a C-.

I have not tried out Amazon Unlimited Music, Business Insider has a good overview of the 99c Trial offer but doesn’t cover the content. What follows are my tweets from my journey around Prime Music, and especially the content.

I’ll be continuing the thread with other thoughts and discoveries. If you are a twitter user, you can follow along here.

In full transparency, I’ve never been a Spotify or Pandora customer. I’ve never felt the need to. Given I have over 1,000 albums and CD’s, and am still cataloging and converting about 2,000 vinyl albums to digital, I’ve never felt the need.

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