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posted by mrpg on Monday April 22 2019, @02:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the ok-alexa-sing-it! dept.

Submitted via IRC for ErkleLives

Amazon today announced the launch of a free, ad-supported music service in the U.S. that will be available to anyone who wants to play free music on their Echo speaker.

Until today, Echo owners who wanted to stream music from Amazon could either pay for an annual Prime membership for access to Prime Music or they could pay $3.99 per month to stream from Amazon Music Unlimited (or $9.99/month to stream on non-Echo devices, as well.)

The new service has the same catalog as Prime Music, which today has just over two million songs. Amazon Music Unlimited, meanwhile, has 50 million songs.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/18/amazon-music-echo-ads/


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  • (Score: 2) by Acabatag on Monday April 22 2019, @02:13AM

    by Acabatag (2885) on Monday April 22 2019, @02:13AM (#833227)

    What tiny subset of Echo Owners will be people who do not have Amazon Prime?

    It seems like it will be a very small percentage.

    Maybe we have reached the point where Echo speakers are being sold in garage sales, so that there will be non-Prime people owning them, but it will have to wait until then for Echo Owners to not be Prime subscribers.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday April 22 2019, @03:24AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday April 22 2019, @03:24AM (#833244) Journal

    GooTube is following suit:

    http://www.iphonehacks.com/2019/04/amazon-google-offer-free-music-streaming-speaker.html [iphonehacks.com]

    Apple and Spotify are way ahead of them, especially in terms of paying subscribers.

    Also, Amazon and Google are playing nice, for the moment:

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2019/04/18/google-amazon-agree-bring-youtube-fire-tv-owners-no-echo-deal/3499157002/ [usatoday.com]

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  • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday April 22 2019, @02:08PM (3 children)

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Monday April 22 2019, @02:08PM (#833379) Journal

    Is that Amazon feels like it can have people put a hat on a hat by juicing Prime members for even more money for "Unlimited" streaming. Which is why I still purchase my music instead of letting it be rented to me, and use YouTube for anything else. So far I've managed to evade Amazon's stickiness in wanting to 'manage' my music for me, but every time I purchase an mp3 for download I'm reminded how I could pay Amazon for the privilege of renting my music instead.

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    • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday April 22 2019, @03:12PM (2 children)

      by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday April 22 2019, @03:12PM (#833407) Journal

      If you are feeling guilty about piracy, by all means pay for that mp3. Then go download a FLAC version from a pirate site. You've earned it.

      We have such ginormous amounts of storage these days that keeping a digital music collection is no problem whatsoever. But it still would be nice if that wasn't necessary to avoid all the politics and propaganda around copyright and DRM, with the constant threat to wipe out your music collection at a stroke.

      • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday April 22 2019, @05:43PM

        by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Monday April 22 2019, @05:43PM (#833465) Journal

        For all my arguments that systems exist and artists and contracted record companies deserve payment, I agree with you. Once one has paid for the content that mode or method of storage is irrelevant once purchased, and if I'm willing to invest in the software and storage then that's my expense to preserve it. (Which is a little inconsistent on my part.... In theory a company would deserve compensation for content with greater resolution/bandwidth. But I'm willing to be inconsistent there, in light of past decisions that seem amenable to time and format shifting).

        The copyright and DRM issues would indeed be nice to avoid, all around. But I also feel that the artist (and that label for that matter) have invested of themselves to produce the music and therefore do deserve compensation if I intend to keep a copy of it. I want to see artists (some, not every one) be able to earn a living, and because I'm willing to pay for the music I don't have much of a problem thinking that others should have to as well. But I'm starting to become hopelessly old-fashioned.

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      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday April 22 2019, @06:03PM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday April 22 2019, @06:03PM (#833472) Journal

        I think 5-8 MB per minute of FLAC is typical. Maybe bump that to 10 MB. A 14 terabyte hard drive could hold 1.4 million minutes of music, about 2.66 years.

        Estimates of the number of songs in the world: 79 million to 97 million (probably a lot more if you count user-uploaded stuff nobody has heard). Song length is typically 3 to 5 minutes. You'd need a 4 petabyte drive to store 400 million minutes (100 million songs), 40 petabytes to store 1 billion songs, etc.

        Obviously, most people don't need or want every recording ever made. But it would be nice to have a complete collection with well-curated metadata on stamp-sized rewritable 5D storage.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Monday April 22 2019, @02:37PM (1 child)

    by Appalbarry (66) on Monday April 22 2019, @02:37PM (#833392) Journal

    So, basically, Amazon has invented commercial radio.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday April 22 2019, @06:03PM

      by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Monday April 22 2019, @06:03PM (#833473) Journal

      Except that it requires their proprietary service to enable. (And if you want it on Echo, their proprietary hardware). Commercial radio, in its purest form (at least in the United States) only requires one to have an open-standard receiver that one can build out of kit-component parts.

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