Amazon Music Unlimited

Introduction

While Spotify is the world’s most popular music streaming service, Apple Music is the best choice for iPhone users, and Tidal and Qobuz are the leading options for audiophiles, Amazon’s place in the competitive landscape is, on the face of it, a little less clear – particularly now that its Spotify Premium-rivalling Unlimited tier is no longer the standout cheapest option among its peers for Amazon Prime members.

That said, it does offer a diluted music experience for Prime members at no extra cost, which could well satisfy casual music streamers who don’t want to spend over a tenner a month for a standalone music service.

And considering its Unlimited tier boasts over 100 million tracks, podcast and audiobook access, a spatial audio library and the highest audio streaming quality out there (24-bit/192kHz), the Amazon offering generally seems in no way lacking compared to others. It also has a unique trick for Amazon Echo and Fire device owners up its sleeve.

So just how well-rounded is Amazon Music Unlimited really, and does it deserve to be your music subscription of choice? I’ve dived headfirst into the service (and its rivals) to find out.

Price

• Free music service available
• Individual, student and family subscription costs rival Spotify’s
• Heavily discounted plan for single Echo/Fire device use

As I’ve touched upon already, multiple Amazon Music tiers are available. Three, in fact.

Amazon Music Free is, as the name suggests, a free music service. Available to anyone with an Amazon account, it offers ad-supported playback of playlists and stations in a shuffle-based experience, with audio quality capped at 320kbps.

Amazon Prime Music, meanwhile, is included in an Amazon Prime membership (£8.99 / $8.99 per month or £95 / $109 per year) and expands user access to a 10 million-strong catalogue while getting rid of adverts. Shuffle-based listening is still the order of the day, although you do get on-demand selections and downloads for around 15 ‘All Access’ playlists.

And then you have Amazon Music Unlimited, the standalone music streaming service most akin to rivals like Spotify and Apple Music. Again, the name very much represents the freedom of music listening on offer here. As well as boundless choice and playback and download control, you get much higher quality audio (up to 24-bit/192kHz), spatial audio tracks, and one audiobook per month from Audible’s extensive collection.

An individual Amazon Music Unlimited subscription costs £11.99 / $11.99 per month – on par with Spotify Premium – or £10.99 / $10.99 for Prime members, which is in line with Apple Music and Tidal’s monthly asking fee.

It’s £5.99 per month for students, while the monthly fee for a Family plan, which gives up to six users in the same household a subscription, is £19.99 / $19.99. The cheapest way to get on board Music Unlimited is via the Single Device plan (£5.99 / $4.99 per month), where subscribers can listen on one Amazon Echo or Fire device they allocate on sign-up.

Platforms

• Almost universal device support
• No proprietary Connect feature

Amazon Music Unlimited is accessible from pretty much every audio device you can think of. You have the mobile (iOS and Android) and desktop (Windows and Mac) apps, plus a web player you can access from an internet browser.

It is also available on various smart speakers (including those from Sonos and Bose), smart TVs, gaming consoles and car infotainment systems, and unsurprisingly is baked into Amazon Echo speakers and Fire TV tablets and streamers.

You can use Google Cast to send music from the catalogue to compatible speakers, too. Amazon doesn’t have its own transmission technology like Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect and Qobuz Connect, though, which is a small shame as, with most devices, Google Cast is limited to 24-bit/96kHz.

Catalogue

• 100m+ library is on par with others
• Spatial audio catalogue
• Podcast and audiobook integration is a bonus

Not much distinguishes one catalogue from another when it comes to the major music services nowadays, with each claiming to hold over 100 million songs, i.e. many more than you would ever reasonably listen to in a lifetime. As such, it’s difficult to find gaps in Amazon’s offering as I search for the most obscure artists I (and Reddit users) can think of.

The library is entirely available in what Amazon refers to as HD quality, which is, to the rest of us, equivalent to CD-quality audio – specifically 16-bit/44.1kHz. And many (particularly new releases and popular artists) are available in Ultra HD quality, which is classified as hi-res audio, specifically between 24-bit/44.1kHz and 192kHz.

In my experience of testing streaming services over the years, the majority of these Ultra HD tracks will be closer to the 44.1kHz parameter (Spotify’s quality cap), but extending the upper limit to 192kHz is certainly beneficial for owners of high-end hi-fi and headphone systems that are revealing enough to benefit from the albums available in that highest quality. Tidal, Apple Music and Qobuz libraries also support 24-bit/192kHz.

Amazon Music Unlimited also, like Tidal and Apple Music, offers an increasingly rich selection of spatial audio songs, which are powered by Dolby Atmos technology and, as such, labelled ‘Atmos’ on the interface.

Like Spotify, Amazon has also expanded its library beyond music, going big on podcasts and, arguably to a lesser extent, audiobooks.

User Experience

• Colourful, graphics-heavy interface
• Well categorised for music, audiobooks and podcasts
• Audio quality labels are, helpfully, everywhere

Both audiobooks and podcasts feature prominently as shortcut tabs on the home screen of the mobile app and web player (only the Podcast tab appears on the desktop app, but that’s one of very few examples of inconsistency across the web, desktop and mobile interfaces).

Dive into the Podcast section and you’ll find ‘popular’, ‘trending’ and ‘best of the week’ curations, as well as titles neatly categorised into genre (news, sport, true crime and so forth). Audiobooks, meanwhile, come via audiobook service Audible (an Amazon subsidiary), which is, unsurprisingly, seamlessly integrated into the interface. Subscribers get one title every month.

That neat, logical approach to podcasts and audiobooks extends to music, too. The home screen is essentially a gateway to an assortment of playlists and artist- and genre-based radio stations that Amazon’s algorithm machine throws up based on your listening habits (more on that shortly), plus new releases, recently played and popular content. That’s all pretty par for the streaming service course these days.

The Search screen is, naturally, headed by a search bar, beneath which are various tabs navigating you to, for example, genre-specific music, podcasts and audiobooks; chart music and ‘Top’ podcasts; and music to suit specific moods and activities. The Library tab, meanwhile, is where you’ll find your own curated playlists, listening history and downloaded music.

Lastly, on the mobile app is an Alexa tab that activates the voice assistant so you can politely ask for specific music to be played.

Overall, the Amazon interface is pleasant to both navigate and look at, not least as it has become increasingly colourful and image-based in recent years. It’s pretty dense; the home screen can be a bit of an eyeful with how much it throws at you, but it’s less overwhelming and more useful the more you listen and, consequently, the better the personalised recommendations become.

I also love how well songs and albums are tagged with the ‘HD’, ‘Ultra HD’ and ‘Atmos’ labels throughout the interface, during browsing and on the playback screen.

Curation

• Plenty of AI-driven playlists and recommendations…
• … but they aren’t as sophisticated as Spotify’s AI engine and discovery

Music discovery has come a long way in recent years and, with the exception of more editor-picked curations you get on some more specialist services (like Qobuz), has largely been handed over to AI machines, which use algorithms to curate playlists and recommend songs and albums based on your listening habits.

This is a large part of the Amazon Music Unlimited experience, and after a week I was pretty happy with the suggestions being pushed in my direction; there was a nice balance of familiar artists and similar ones I hadn’t heard of before.

‘My Soundtrack’ appears to be the headlining AI playlist, while non-stop-playback ‘stations’ based on specific artists or a mix of genres you like are also very prominent.

Spotify edges Amazon (and indeed every other rival) in the discovery and curation arenas, mind you. Its ‘Release Radar’, ‘Discover Weekly’ and annual ‘Spotify Wrapped’ playlists are unmatched on Amazon, and the AI experience seems generally more mature.

For example, asking Alexa to play “autumnal music” on Amazon Music brought up Constance Lucas’s Autumnal Gold track rather than an AI-driven playlist of folk/indie/jazz songs I had hoped for (and can get on Spotify by typing in similar terminology).

Sound Quality

• More open, lively sound than Spotify’s
• On par with Tidal’s quality

When Apple Music started offering subscribers 24-bit hi-res audio quality at no extra cost in 2021, Amazon quickly followed suit; it scrapped its pricier ‘Amazon Music HD’ tier under which hi-res audio quality existed, and offered everything under its Music Unlimited subscription. Ever since, it has, like Apple, Tidal and Qobuz, flown the flag for good-value, high-quality streaming.

I listen to streams primarily through the Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2 wireless headphones I’m testing, as well as my high-end Chord Hugo 2 DAC/Grado GS1000 headphones system, and the Amazon catalogue feeds both excellent-sounding setups the quality they deserve.

Play everything from Taylor Swift to Olafur Arnalds to slowdive, and tracks sound nicely open and articulate, the generous space in the soundstage bristling with frequency-wide detail and expressive dynamics. There’s a pleasant fullness to the presentation that doesn’t extend into excessive richness or compromise clarity, and music doesn’t feel bereft of energy.

I prefer the more spacious and tad livelier presentation Amazon offers compared to Spotify, though I can imagine some siding with the green giant’s more direct approach. It’s a more closely fought battle between Amazon and Tidal, mind you, to the point where my preference kept see-sawing between the two. Needless to say, Amazon, like Tidal, is a great-sounding service.

Should you buy it?

FAQs