Amazon adds streaming Prime Music to play against Apple's Beats
Amazon launched a streaming-music service called Prime Music, making the gamble that adding on-demand tunes to its $99-a-year Prime service will be more important in drawing new members than matching the exhaustive catalog offered by rivals Spotify and Apple's to-be-acquired Beats Music. Prime Music goes live Thursday with more than 1 milliontracks pulled from the catalogs of two of the top three record labels -- WarnerMusic Group and Sony Music -- as well as from large independentlabels. Universal, the world's biggest recorded music company, is absent.Bycomparison, Spotify, the leader in subscription streaming music with 10million paying members, andBeats Music, which Apple agreedto buy last month for $3 billion, have catalogs withmore than 20 million tracks."A lot of these services have more music than people will ever listen to,"Steve Boom, Amazon's vice president of worldwide digital music, said in an interview. "People are paying for a lot of music they're never going to listen to." AmazonThe Seattle-based e-commerce company is the latest tech giant to turn on a subscription streaming-music service. In the past few years, services offering all-you-can-eat music for a monthly fee have become recorded music's brightest spot of revenue growth. Revenue from subscription and streaming services rose 51 percent to top $1 billion for the first time last year, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Those sales countered a slide in physical sales (think CDs) and a slight decline in digital music download revenue.But the nascent model has yet to prove it can be profitable --reportedly, even as Spotify's revenue has grown, so too have its losses.Amazon's unique take, bundling music as part of its Prime service,underscores how companies are still trying to figure out a business model that works. The Prime program, which has tens of millions of members, already offers two-day shipping on select Amazon purchases, a Netflix-like streaming video service, and a lending library of e-books for Kindle devices, the Amazon family of tablets and e-reader.The number of songs in a catalog is a "red herring," Boom said. Amazon's music download store has almost 30 million tracks, and a "substantial" portion are never downloaded, he said.And,as reported earlier by Buzzfeed, Prime Music won't always get tracks as soon as they are available. Amazon said its deals bring some songs on board right after they're released, but others will be delayed, a tactic known as "windowing." None of its deals with music providers have delays longer than six months, the company said. The trade-off in agreeing to such windows is that Amazon lowers the cost of licensing.Given the limitations of its music offerings, Amazon is unlikely to attract new Prime members solely by the virtues of its music-streaming product. Amazon's advantage, however, is the package including both music and video -- plus shipping and e-books -- for a lower yearly price than the sum of the parts elsewhere. The Beats service and Spotify each charge subscribers $10 a month; Beats also charges $99 for an annual membership, the same price as more diverse Prime. Netflix charges about $8 a month and is rolling out a price increase to $9.Prime Music makes Amazon one of the rare companies offering both music downloads (songs that you can buy) and subscriptions. Most subscriptions services like Beats Music and Spotify focus on streaming the songs for a set fee, though Spotify and Pandora each offer a free, ad-supported streaming service. With Prime Music, Amazon joins Google in offering both options to a huge base of customers, as Google's Play store sells downloads and also offers an All Access subscription option for $10. Google executives have said that subscription has helped its store, rather than hurt it.Apple, which defined the music downloads market with its iTunes store in 2003, had for years dismissed the subscription model, based on the presumption that consumers didn't want it and that an all-you-can-eat buffet of tunes would keep customers from paying for songs. That will change when Apple closes its deal for headphone maker Beats, which is expected later this year. Related links:Apple finally confirms it's buying Beats for $3BGoogle Play Music quietly coats the globe (Q&A)Amazon Fire TV has videos, games -- where’s the shopping cart?How Amazon Studios went from grassroots idealist to Hollywood threat Prime Music, which is ad-free, will be available as an automatic over-the-air update to Kindle Fire HD and HDX devices. It is available online at primemusic.com, and through the latest Amazon Music app for iOS, Apple's mobile operating system, and Android, the mobile operating system from Google that runs the majority of the world's smartphones. Amazon also has desktop clients for Windows and Mac computers.The service allows people to pick specific tracks to add to a library, which can also be populated by music the member has purchased either through Amazon or a rival download store if they're in an Amazon Cloud Player, a storage locker for music. Adding a song or album to a library will trigger a song recommendation carousel familiar to anyone who has shopped on Amazon before: "Customers who bought this album also bought..."Prime Music also has hundreds of playlists compiled by experts that Amazon drew from music publications, labels, radio stations, and musicians themselves. The playlists are based on artists such as "Pink's Top Songs," genres such as "50 Great R&B Slow Jams," mood such as "Pop to Make You Feel Better," or activity such as "Rock for Runners."Amazon's service also allows off-line caching of music, so users can listen without being connected to a network.Playlists are designed to have about 20 to 50 tracks, so they won't hog storage space on phones or kill a mobile device's data limit. On Kindle Fire HD and HDX devices, lyrics to songs will automatically scroll when a song is playing.Much like Prime Instant Video, Prime Music will offer buttons to buy music that isn't available as part of the subscription. But, at least initially, commerce integration with the broader Amazon store stops there. For example, adding a SpongeBob SquarePants song to your library won't prompt you to buy a SpongeBob backpack.Even without that, Prime Music -- like every Amazon move -- is ultimately aimed at ushering users back into its store. Analysts say that Prime customers buy more than regular shoppers. Now they can shop while listening to some of their favorite tunes.It would make a perfect Prime Music playlist: "Music for 1-Click Ordering."
iHeartRadio retunes iOS, Android apps for more talk radio
iHeartRadio retunes iOS, Android apps for more talk radio
The updates get talk content more quickly to listeners' ears where people are looking for digital radio most -- on their phones. Unsurprisingly, with most online radio listening is moving to mobile devices, 60 percent of people listening to iHeartRadio Talk since its beta launch in late July are doing so with a portable device, the company said. iHeart Radio's app updates will be available for iOS on Monday and on Thursday for Android, including the Kindle. It's the latest maneuver by an online radio challenger to Pandora that tests out weak spots in the armor of the biggest online radio service in the US. With about 72 million active users a month, Pandora dominates online radio listening. By comparison, the monthly unique visitors to iHeartRadio are less than one-fourth that level, according to figures from ComScore, and iHeartRadio is one of the closest competitors. Yet Pandora's strongest suit has always been music, going back to its origins with the Music Genome Project that catalogs songs by their musical DNA to make recommendations. While Pandora also has a talk element, Clear Channel's long history with talk radio provided iHeart a way to attract an audience that the online leader in radio wasn't as well equipped to woo. And that audience was already tuning in: Before the dedicated talk feature launched, talk content already accounted for 25 percent of iHeartRadio listening, compared to about 16 percent of terrestrial radio listening.Launched in late July, iHeartRadio Talk brought online a cache of talk content, not only fromshows from big-name personalities on Clear Channel's network of stations but also will allow aspiring talk-radio stars to record their own episodes on Spreaker and submit them to the iHeartRadio library for listeners to pick out.Overall, the iHeartRadio app has been downloaded 225 million times. The crowded field of contenders reflects how streaming music is the fastest growing segment of the recorded music industry.But it still lags far behind traditional AM/FM radio. Even at its perch on the top of the online world, Pandora only represents about 7.5 percent of all US radio listening. And the iHeartRadio app updates arrive on the stage with another competitive threat waiting in the wings: iTunes Radio. The online radio service from Apple is set to launch Tuesday in the US as part of iOS 7. While iTunes Radio may be coming to the game late by tech standards, the 575 million customers iTunes already means Apple is getting an airlift into the race near the front of the pack.
The updates get talk content more quickly to listeners' ears where people are looking for digital radio most -- on their phones. Unsurprisingly, with most online radio listening is moving to mobile devices, 60 percent of people listening to iHeartRadio Talk since its beta launch in late July are doing so with a portable device, the company said. iHeart Radio's app updates will be available for iOS on Monday and on Thursday for Android, including the Kindle. It's the latest maneuver by an online radio challenger to Pandora that tests out weak spots in the armor of the biggest online radio service in the US. With about 72 million active users a month, Pandora dominates online radio listening. By comparison, the monthly unique visitors to iHeartRadio are less than one-fourth that level, according to figures from ComScore, and iHeartRadio is one of the closest competitors. Yet Pandora's strongest suit has always been music, going back to its origins with the Music Genome Project that catalogs songs by their musical DNA to make recommendations. While Pandora also has a talk element, Clear Channel's long history with talk radio provided iHeart a way to attract an audience that the online leader in radio wasn't as well equipped to woo. And that audience was already tuning in: Before the dedicated talk feature launched, talk content already accounted for 25 percent of iHeartRadio listening, compared to about 16 percent of terrestrial radio listening.Launched in late July, iHeartRadio Talk brought online a cache of talk content, not only fromshows from big-name personalities on Clear Channel's network of stations but also will allow aspiring talk-radio stars to record their own episodes on Spreaker and submit them to the iHeartRadio library for listeners to pick out.Overall, the iHeartRadio app has been downloaded 225 million times. The crowded field of contenders reflects how streaming music is the fastest growing segment of the recorded music industry.But it still lags far behind traditional AM/FM radio. Even at its perch on the top of the online world, Pandora only represents about 7.5 percent of all US radio listening. And the iHeartRadio app updates arrive on the stage with another competitive threat waiting in the wings: iTunes Radio. The online radio service from Apple is set to launch Tuesday in the US as part of iOS 7. While iTunes Radio may be coming to the game late by tech standards, the 575 million customers iTunes already means Apple is getting an airlift into the race near the front of the pack.
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