Amazon May Add Music Streaming to Echo

Amazon is working on a couple ad-free music streaming service, one of which would be exclusive to its wildly popular Echo Bluetooth speaker/personal assistant.

The company Amazon wants to offer the Echo-only service for around $5 a month and also is considering launching a $10/month service along the lines of Spotify, according to the website Recode.

From the report:

Industry sources say Amazon would like to launch both services in September, but has yet to finalize deals with major music labels and publishers. One sticking point, sources say, is whether Amazon will sell the cheaper service for $4 or $5 a month.

An Amazon rep declined to comment.

The $10-a-month service would replicate features that used to be hard to find but are now common: Unlimited, ad-free music you can play on any device you want and also download for offline playback. The lower-priced service would represent a novel approach. Other services have tried, without success, to offer subscriptions in the $5 range. But those have usually been variants of web radio services, which don’t let users play any song they want, whenever they want.

That’s also the approach Pandora is taking with a new $5 service it has in the works, which it wants to launch alongside a standard $10-a-month service.

Amazon’s discount service would be different, industry sources say, because it would work like Spotify or Apple Music—unlimited, ad-free music on demand—but it would be constrained to Amazon’s Echo player, and wouldn’t work on phones…

Amazon already offers an Amazon Music service free for Amazon Prime subscribers, but that service only has a limited catalog of music.

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