

If you have an Amazon Echo smart speaker, you can also get a plan that limits your subscription to only that device for $5.99.Īmazon’s advantages over Spotify when it comes to attracting customers to its service offerings are numerous. For comparison, Spotify Premium costs $11.95 for lossy quality.Ī post shared by Amazon Music if you have an Amazon Prime subscription you can access their family plan, which offers six accounts for $17.99. But why will Amazon Music Unlimited succeed in bringing HiFi audio to the masses where previous streaming services, most notably Tidal, have failed? Two main reasons:Īmazon Music Unlimited is the top tier of Amazon’s music streaming services, the company also offer Amazon Music Free and Amazon Music Prime, which comes free with an Amazon Prime subscription but only offers a catalogue of two million songs.Īmazon Music Unlimited offers a three-month free trial, and then costs $11.99 per month for new subscribers. If you’ll be listening primarily on wireless headphones, you’ll want to ensure you have advanced Bluetooth.īut considering the amount of people walking around with high-quality headphones listening to audio-quality worse than your Mp3 player when you were a kid, it’s safe to assume that the market for Amazon Music Unlimited is going to be huge. Most phones, tablets, laptops and Chromecasts made since 2014 will support HD and Ultra HD playback, as will standard mobile reception, and wired headphones and speakers with a frequency response of 20 Hz to 20 kHz. To check out what this actually sounds like, you can head over to their website. Īmazon Music Unlimited also offers spatial audio – otherwise known by Sony as ‘360 Reality Audio’ and Dolby as ‘Dolby Atmos’ – which attempts to recreate the immersive audio experience of hearing music played live.

Keep up with the latest music news, features, festivals, interviews and reviews here. The higher the bitrate, the less audio you’re losing in the compression process, which means the tracks you hear on Amazon Music Unlimited are going to be a lot closer to what the artist and producer created than what you’ll hear on lower bitrate audio streaming services.


For comparison’s sake, a CD is 1,411 kbps. The company note that it also offers millions of those songs in Ultra High Definition with an average bitrate of 3,730 kbps. That’s about two-and-a-half times the bitrate that Spotify Premium offers, but it’s also not as high-fidelity as Amazon Music Unlimited offers. Amazon Music Unlimited is the new-ish music streaming service from Amazon that offers 90 million songs with an average bitrate of 850 kbps.
