Amazon Music is now free, but there's a catch

Amazon announced today that its Music service is now free for Prime Members. However, as there always is, there’s a catch.

So Prime Members can now get all 100 million songs in the Music library for free. Basically, you’ll have to live with shuffled tracks. Which, if you’re using Amazon Music to play music in the background while you’re working and such, then it’s not a big deal. It does mean that you won’t be able to tell Alexa to play a specific song though.

For all of the other features with Amazon Music, you’ll need to upgrade to Amazon Music Unlimited which is $9 per month. That’s still cheaper than Spotify, YouTube Music and Apple Music, however. Many current Amazon Music subscribers likely won’t find that this new tier is the way to go. But it is good to have this option.

It’s another way for Amazon to justify its Prime increase

Back in February of this year, Amazon changed the price of Prime, going from $119 to $139 per year. And the monthly plan jumped from $12.99 to $14.99 per month. Students also saw a price increase of $10, to $69 per year.

So adding the ability to get streaming music for free is really a way that Amazon is trying to justify the latest price increase for Amazon Prime. Prime does offer a ton of benefits, though not everyone is going to use every benefit. So that’s worthwhile to keep in mind.

Then again, this new tier could also be used to get members interested in Amazon Music, and then upgrade to Amazon Music Unlimited so they can have full control over their music. Either way, it’s a smart move for Amazon Music, seeing as they are one of the smaller streaming music services out there, it could entice people to move away from the competition.