The Amazon Music Library Is Now Free for Prime Members (With a Catch)
Amazon just rolled out a big new Prime member benefit: the entire Amazon Music library, free. While you used to have to pay $8.99 a month to access all 100 million songs as an Amazon Music Unlimited subscriber, Amazon has officially included all their content as a part of the $139/year Prime subscription.
Before you cancel your Spotify Premium account, hang on a sec. While this is a pretty big add to the list of perks for Prime members, there are some definite things you need to know about what Amazon is (and isn’t) offering.
Prime members already may start listening to all of the Amazon Music selections, like right now, but you’ll want to keep reading to find out exactly how you can use this streaming music service.
(And if you’re looking for more deals like this, you’ll want to text AMAZON to 57299.)
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If you’re a Prime member, you now have access to all 100 million songs on Amazon Music, free.
Is Amazon Music free with Prime? It is now. Obviously, an Amazon Prime membership isn’t free — it’s $139/year — but if you’re already a member, you can start listening to the newly expanded Amazon Music library. In the past, Prime members only had access to about 2 million songs on the platform, but now you can listen to the entire 100 million song library.
How to start listening on the web:
- Log in to your Amazon Prime account
- Go to the Amazon Music Prime page
- Click the Listen Now button
How to start listening on mobile:
- Download the Amazon Music app (iOS / Android) and log in with your Prime account
- Authorize your device to stream Amazon Music
How to start listening with Alexa:
- Ask Alexa to play a song or artist
- Alexa will tell you that you’re going to be shuffling
- Music will start playing
You can only shuffle through artists and albums — no picking individual songs.
While you technically have access to everything in the Amazon Music library, you can’t just request whatever song you want.
If you’re a Prime member, but not a subscriber to the separate $9/month Amazon Music Unlimited service, you’ll have to shuffle when listening to artists or albums. Still, the free shuffling for Prime members is better than Spotify Free because unlike Spotify Free, Prime Music has no ads. You can create playlists using the Amazon Music app, but those shuffle, too — and will play “related” songs.
Here are all the perks that are available via Unlimited, but not Prime Music:
- Playing specific songs
- Skipping songs as many times as you want
- High-fidelity sound quality
- Spatial audio sound
Tip: Amazon still really wants you to upgrade to Amazon Music Unlimited. If you’re navigating the Amazon site, you’ll want to use the link above for Prime Music because otherwise you may end up accidentally signing up for Amazon Music Unlimited (although they’re offering a free 30-day trial, so even if you sign up, you have time to cancel).
There’s a work-around to the shuffle-only restriction: Find songs released as singles.
If you search for a specific song and hit shuffle to start playing, you’ll most likely hear your target song as either the second or third song in the sequence. That’s been our experience, anyway.
But there’s another work-around. Many times, artists release their biggest songs as singles. Search for your favorite song, and if a separate single release turns up in the search results, play it. Basically, you’re “shuffling” a 1-song album. Shortcut!
Prime members get to listen to every Amazon podcast commercial-free, too.
Amazon has a bunch of their own in-house podcasts — including everything from their recently purchased podcast studio Wondery. And as part of the new expansion, Prime members will get ad-free access to those shows.
You can browse the entire library of ad-free podcasts that you can start listening to whenever (and you can “favorite” shows to receive notifications when they release new episodes).
Amazon’s audiobook marketplace Audible (still) isn’t free.
Before you get too excited about all of the audio additions to your Prime account, just know that an audiobook subscription to Audible will still cost you extra (starting at $7.95 per month).
But if you’ve never been an Audible Premium Plus member before, you can get a 30-day free trial which will get you access to a selection of included originals, audiobooks, sleep tracks, podcasts, and meditation programs — plus two free audiobooks. (Once the trial ends, you’ll get one free audiobook per month.)
