Now, as subscriptions reach maturing in most of the world’s bigger music markets, rightsholders are shifting focus from full frontal growth to a more segmented approach that can unlock growth pockets in otherwise mature markets. Over the years, rightsholders unlocked extra slices of catalogue, but today’s announcement is the genuine step change. So, rightsholders insisted on a limited catalogue size to ensure that it did not risk cannibalising potential 9.99 subscriptions.

At the time, Prime Music looked risky to rightsholders: just as subscriptions were beginning to get traction, along comes a service that gives consumers a music subscription experience, free at point of access. So much so that Universal Music did not license it until 15 months later (making Amazon the only global scale streaming service that was able to successfully launch without all three majors on board). When Amazon launched Prime Music, it was not exactly with exuberant support from music rightsholders. Which is a good part of the reason it just unlocked those extra 98 million tracks for Prime Music users. But what makes Amazon Music so important to the music industry is not just its size but its audience segmentation. It has the third-largest subscriber count of any Western streaming service and will likely pass Apple Music in second place sometime within the next twelve months, quite possibly sooner. And yet, the catalogue increase is actually really important, but because of what it represents rather than what it actually is.īack in the mid-2010s, MIDiA first identified Amazon as being the dark horse of streaming music, but these days there is no doubting Amazon Music’s thoroughbred pedigree. Prime Music already had a good chunk of the most valuable tracks, now it has all of them, alongside tens of millions of streaming detritus. With around 2.5 million new songs being uploaded to streaming services every single month, the simple truth is that most people will not listen to most of the catalogue. It is kind of a big deal, but not that big a deal when you consider the actual value of these additional 98 million tracks. Amazon Music today announced that it was extending the number of songs available on its Prime Music tier from two million to one hundred million.

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