Amazon launches new music streaming service in the UK

Music Unlimited differs greatly from the Prime Music service which comes with your Amazon Prime subscription - instead of two million tracks, there's 40 million (give or take). As well as an enhanced catalogue, Amazon are focusing on their Echo gizmo and Alexa AI.

"We think voice is going to be really important. Voice control is the future of music listening in the home, and probably in the car as well," said Amazon’s Paul Firth to Music Ally. "Music is one of the most important things on Echo: it’s been a key part of the experience from day one."

The integration between Echo and Music Unlimited is the big selling point here (although Echo supports Spotify too), with Firth explaining that Echo can find a certain song based on lyric fragments or suggested moods.

“We’re having to invent new metadata: ways to say that this track has just been served to radio, or this is the one that’s climbing the singles chart, so that when people ask for an artist’s ‘new’ song, they get the one they’ve just heard on the radio or wherever it was,” adds Firth. “This is complicated stuff, but hopefully we’ve made it easy. Alexa is getting smarter all the time, and we’re having to teach her new things like that way to look at the ‘latest’ track. The focus is on making it really easy to listen to music.”

Interestingly, Firth also tells Music Ally that these recommendations don't come from a pre-stocked playlist or station.

“We’re building you a list of music on the fly, using a combination of genre, the decade - the original release date, not re-releases - and a mood... we’ve been through and categorised things in 11 different moods, some of that manually and then machine-learning to spread that across the rest of the catalogue. It’s hopefully another example where we’ve done something actually really complicated, but made it really easy for the listener.”

This all sounds promising, but whether Amazon will be able to make a dent in the crowded market remains to be seen.

Music Unlimited costs £9.99 per month (£7.99 for if you have a Prime account already), with a £3.99 option if you're just using the service on Echo. There's a 30-day free trial.

The US version of Music Unlimited debuted last month.