Amazon May Launch A Free, Ad-Supported Music Streaming Service

Spotify offers something that some of its biggest rivals don’t: Free music streaming provided users are okay with putting up with ads. You obviously get more features with the Premium tier but for those who just want the basics, the free tier works well. It appears that Amazon now wants to challenge Spotify on this front.

Billboard hears that Amazon is in talks about launching a free, ad-supported music streaming service in the near future. The service will reportedly provide access to a “limited catalog” of tracks but this will enable people to have something to play on their Alexa speaker, for example, without having to sign up and pay for another service.

It’s not clear at this point in time just how big of a catalog this is going to be but Amazon is said to be willing to pay labels per stream regardless of how many ads are run alongside the streams. Amazon hasn’t commented on the matter as yet.

The catalog may not be larger than Amazon Prime Music in any case, which is one of the company’s pay-only services. Amazon Prime Music and Music Unlimited had 20 million subscribers as of last year. This figure comes from third-party reports as Amazon itself hasn’t disclosed how many people are actually paying for its music services.

Amazon May Launch A Free, Ad-Supported Music Streaming Service , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.