So this week Amazon released Prime Music in the UK which is a (very) restricted version of Spotify Premium. When I say restricted we are talking about 1 million tracks compared to Spotify’s 30 million catalogue. However, Prime Music is an additional perk of the Amazon Prime package which includes next day delivery, Prime Instant Video (Amazon’s Netflix) along with some other bits and pieces for £80 a year.
Don’t worry this isn’t about to turn into an advert for Amazon (although if you want to sign up you can do so here and I will receive a kickback 😉 ).
The point is you can see where this is going. We have long subscribed to Netflix and then Amazon Instant Video came along (rebranded from LoveFilm) and I regularly ask myself whether we should dump one or the other. To date we have decided that there is sufficient content that is unique to both services that we can justify them both but I can see the day coming when that is no longer the case. Amazon would no doubt win out in that battle due to the core one day delivery that we love.
Same with music. I have toyed with the idea of a Spotify Premium account in the past but I have plenty of music of my own and now with Prime Music I get additional coverage that I wouldn’t have got before. Sorry Spotify.
How many others are having the same thoughts and closing their alternative accounts? Which is exactly what Amazon want of course. The danger is what is going keep the prices competitive if the other players are reduced. I can see that £80 rapidly going north if that were to happen.
All the Amazon Prime offerings are pretty good and have some good content but boy the user interfaces are ugly and hard to navigate. Netflix meanwhile is beautiful and easy to use, probably because it is only trying to be one thing. The problem with the Amazon interface is that it is trying to shoehorn streaming content into a platform that is geared up for selling stuff. That said the interface for AWS (Amazon’s services platform) looks good and works well so perhaps the UX experts from that team should be seconded to the main site!
Oh and that reminds me. This blog is running on a server hosted by Amazon as is the database. And that is where the real money is. I can see a time when Amazon are the sales, streaming and infrastructure platform for the world. For me that took a step closer to reality this week. Jeff Bezos won’t be sad to hear that at all.