Amazon
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Amazon Music will expand its ad-free offering for Prime members from 2 million songs to more than 100 million songs, the company announced on Tuesday (November 1). There is one caveat, however: Prime members can only listen on shuffle, unless they upgrade to Amazon Music Unlimited.
Along with the increased access to music, Amazon announced that Prime members will also have access to a wide-selection of ad-free podcasts, plus a newly launched Podcast Previews feature that lets listeners easily test snippets of episodes to see if they like them.
“When Amazon Music first launched for Prime members, we offered an ad-free catalog of 2 million songs, which was completely unique for music streaming at the time,” Steve Boom, vp of Amazon Music, said in a statement. “We continue… to bring even more entertainment to Prime members, on top of the convenience and value they already enjoy. We can’t wait for members to experience not only a massively expanded catalog of songs, but also the largest selection of ad-free top podcasts anywhere, at no additional cost to their membership.”
This expansion follows the news from April that Amazon Music Unlimited raised its price for Prime subscribers from $7.99 per month to $8.99 (or from $79 per year to $89) and similarly upped the cost of its single-device plan (for Amazon’s Echo and Fire TV devices) from $3.99 to $4.99 per month. Other prominent streaming services recently took similar steps, with YouTube’s Premium Family plan — which includes its music subscription service — jumping from $17.99 to $22.99 per month, and Apple Music individual plans climbing from $9.99 to $10.99.
Amazon launched Prime Music with over one million songs, primarily catalog material, in 2014. Two years later, the company rolled out a multi-tiered offering, Amazon Music Unlimited, with many more titles.
“From our perspective, with Prime we helped push the music industry away from the one-size-fits all approach to music streaming, and to go after different customer segments,” Boom told Billboard at the time. “We’re going to grow the market [and add] new customers to streaming with a great way to get into streaming with really low friction.”
In 2020, Amazon said it had “more than 55 million” subscribers across its various listening tiers.
Amazon has laid off around 150 employees at its recently launched live-radio app Amp, according to a report at Business Insider. Though Amazon would not comment on the numbers in the report, the company confirms to Billboard that it has chosen “to consolidate a few teams” at the division.
“At Amazon we think big, experiment, and invest in new ideas to delight customers,” said the company in a statement. “We also continually evaluate the progress and potential of our products and services to deliver customer value, and we regularly make adjustments based on those assessments. We’ve made the decision to consolidate a few teams so we can focus on the growth and scaling of Amp.”
Amazon is working to identify other opportunities within the company for affected employees.
Launched in March, Amp allows users to host their own shows by streaming music from a catalog of tens of millions of licensed songs from the three major labels, as well as Indies including Beggars Group, PIAS, Believe and CD Baby. Though it’s designed primarily for non-celebrity creators, Amp also hosts or has announced shows from high-profile artists including Pusha T, Tinashe, Travis Barker, Lil Yachty, Lindsey Stirling, Big Boi and Nicki Minaj, who brought her Apple Music show Queen Radio to the platform at launch. In September, Amp announced it would launch a monthly fund to reward emerging U.S.-based creators for building loyal audiences on the app.
The cuts at Amp come on the heels of Amazon’s Q3 earnings report on Thursday (Oct. 27), when the company revealed it had grown its headcount by just 21,000 employees — a sharp year-over-year drop after it added 133,000 employees over the same period in 2021.
On a call with reporters, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said the company was “preparing for what could be a slower growth period” in an anticipation of an economic slowdown, citing inflation and rising energy costs, among other factors. “We are going to be very careful on our hiring,” Olsavsky added. “We certainly are looking at our cost structure and looking for areas where we can save money.”
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