Amazon soft-launched a free tier for its music streaming service Friday. U.S. Alexa owners can access some playlists and stations via the voice assistant.
Alexa, Play Music
Amazon Music trails both Spotify and Apple Music in terms of listeners (via Variety). This move may be a way of trying to attract more people to the service.
It had previously only been available to Prime members or those who subscribed to Amazon Music Unlimited. However, in an announcement today, the company said Alexa users “now have access to play a station based on a song, artist, era, and genre, and to hear some of Amazon Music’s top global playlists.” The music is access via Alexa commands such as “Alexa, play the playlist Pop Culture”.
Official YouTube App Coming
It was the second media move by the company this week. On Thursday, along with Google, it announced an official YouTube app on Amazon Fire TV devices and Fire TV Edition smart TVs will arrive “in the coming months.”