Amazon set to launch music streaming service under Amazon Prime: report

Amazon, like many other companies is riding on the trend of online music streaming. The company is all set to expand its services to online music streaming by making available a good bunch of old and somewhat new music to subscribers on demand according to a report by BuzzFeed.   The company has reportedly scheduled the launch of this service which is yet to be named in the month of June or July. The music collection will not include recent releases but will include songs and albums that are six months old and older. This information was supposedly confirmed with five music industry sources familiar with the company’s plan.   The service that is yet to be announced will work exactly like the Prime Instant Video, which gives on-demand video option to its Prime members. The service will not allow streaming of all music available in the industry but will provide its listeners songs and albums that Amazon has licensed from labels at a discount. It’s a limited music service, unlike other streaming services like Spotify, Pandora and Rdio.   With over 20 million reported Prime members on Amazon, this new venture will prove to be quite beneficial as it already offers movie and TV shows on demand, e-book lending libraries for its Kindle readers. It also ties into Amazon’s home entertainment plans with the Fire TV. Not long ago Amazon had increased the pricing for its Prime membership from $79 to $99 and this add-on service of streaming music might just make the $20 worthwhile, though it remains to be seen what music Amazon has got its hands on.   Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group and several independent music labels have supposedly reached an agreement. Labels would have the power to pick and choose the albums to stream based on Amazon’s existing music and retail operations, according to the report. Amazon has previously signed such limited arrangement deals with HBO where only **select number of HBO’s older shows** was allowed to be available on Prime Instant Video. It looks like the company is getting everything it can while it waits for the right time for a full-fledged roll out.   The service plans to include accessibility across multiple devices with offline capabilities. The streaming music scene is making a lot of noise with **Apple’s recent acquisition of Beats Music** . With **the likes of Spotify and Pandora adding more subscribers** , and YouTube rumoured to be launching paid subscription, we doubt Amazon’s new service would have an easy time of it, but it does have a huge user base to tap into.