Amazon's New Play for Music Streaming

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Spotify and Apple Music are the most popular destinations for music streaming these days (even though Pandora is one of the highest-earning apps in the US). There are other names you may have seen when exploring music streamers, but Amazon Music, which launched all the way back in 2012, isn't likely to be one of those.

Well, Amazon is (finally) trying to change that!

Last week the service unlocked a catalog of 100M songs and podcasts, which is an important tidbit I'll get back to later, to every Prime subscriber.

Some day they did it to justify Prime's 17% price hike. It could be that they're running out of ways to grow Prime, or maybe they're trying to unmiss a missed opportunity.

Whatever it is, it seems to be working!

According to our App Intelligence, downloads of Amazon Music, which changed its icon last week, grew 34% on Tuesday, giving Amazon Music its best day of downloads, ever!

Daily downloads rose from an average of 120K in October to more than 160K on Tuesday. That's across the App Store and Google Play combined, but the majority of the growth is coming from the App Store right now. I expect Google Play to catch up slowly as well.

For a brief moment, Amazon Music even got close to Spotify in terms of downloads in the US App Store.

Amazon has made a lot of moves related to content this year. Hits and misses, mostly misses, which is why I'm not expecting this trend to continue, but there are two reasons it might:

1. Music, unlike movies and shows, is still not something streamers are creating, making Amazon's catalog just as good as Apple's and Spotify's, but free(er). That's sure to claw at the competition.
2. Original content for music streamers comes in the form of podcasts these days, and Amazon's press release used a lot of words to talk about podcasts, making me believe they're looking for their Joe Rogen right now. They might find one.

Amazon's track record isn't amazing so this is all a big question mark, but for now, free/included with Prime is sure to annoy the competition.