Amazon Finally Rolls Out Prime Music in India

Online music streaming services seem to be attracted towards India lately. With the news of Spotify soon entering India, Amazon wasn’t really far behind rather ahead with the launch of Amazon Prime Music, this week. It is, however, called Amazon Music. Currently, Amazon is offering Prime Music bundled with the Prime package which costs Rs.999 for a year. You can now access it via music.amazon.in, or download the Amazon Music app on Android, iOS, Amazon Fire TV, Windows, and Mac. Well, this launch makes it a full-fledged one. Prime Music was previously available to users of Amazon Echo smart speakers in India. The prices announced are highly competitive as compared to other players in the market at the moment. The current leaders Gaana.com and Wynk.com offer the services in India at the same price. While Apple Music and Google Music struggle in India, Apple Music is one of the more expensive services at Rs. 1200 per year while all others offering same plans for Rs.999 for a year.

Amazon Music (Desktop View)

Amazon India also suggests that the service helps users find their specific preference with a varied list of genres. You can find Genres s Carnatic Classical, Devotional, Ghazals, Hindustani Classical, Rabindra Sangeet, and Sufi & Qawaali and more. Recently, Amazon made content deals with leading Indian music labels  T-Series, Sony Music, Zee Music, Tips, Saregama, Times Music, and more. Amazon Music has a bunch of languages for users to select from. The languages included at the moment are: Hindi, English, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, and Rajasthani. On our first use, we found that no matter what language you use, you will still find music from other languages. Guess the language selection tools merely prioritizes rather than filtering music. [caption id="attachment_4256" align="alignnone" width="780"] We had chosen 'English' as the preferred language. However, Amazon suggested on these slick playlists.[/caption] However, the way Amazon has bundled the Prime services together, it seems like we might have a winner here. However, inventory is highly questionable along with the content. It would take more than a minute to see if this sudden rise in streaming services make some space for Indian independent artists. As of now, there is no currently existing service that has a dedicated category for indie artists. We have a similar question in mind in case of other up and coming streaming services as well.