Amazon Music Now Has ‘Tens of Millions’ of Paying Subscribers

• Amazon Music Unlimited poised to soon become a competitor to Apple Music.
• The number of subscribers has doubled in the last six months.
• A large part of this success is Amazon's range of smart speakers who rely on Music Unlimited to stream audio files. 

As Spotify prepares to go public and generate a new revenue stream, its competitors are working hard on attracting new subscribers. Even though Amazon Music Unlimited doesn’t look like a viable alternative to popular music services, things are about to change soon. Speaking to Billboard, Amazon Music’s Vice President Steve Boom said that this music streaming service is doing incredibly well.

Even though a specific number of subscribers wasn’t mentioned, Boom said that Amazon Music has tens of million of paying customers. Furthermore, this number has doubled in the last six months. As a reminder, Spotify and Apple Music are currently the biggest players in this field, having 71 million and 36 million subscribers respectively. If we take a look at these numbers, it seems like Amazon Music might soon become a real competitor to Apple Music.

Boom also added that Amazon’s recent success was the result of careful product consideration. First, there are numerous smart speakers produced by this company. Products like Amazon Echo can be used to stream music from the cloud, and these files come from Amazon Music Unlimited. In addition, this company offers a wide range of subscription options. Amazon Prime customers get a discount, as well as users of Amazon’s smart devices. On top of that, there’s a family plan and student discounts. If we take a look at all these aspects, it’s easy to see that Amazon is targeting a different group of users than Spotify and Apple Music are doing. Boom said: “Our goal has been to expand the premium streaming market, not to run in a horse race with the other players each going after the same demographic.”

Even though it seems like Amazon Music is rapidly growing, the same cannot be said about other endeavors by this company. As it was announced last year, Amazon plans to wind down its digital music locker service. It is expected that users of Amazon Music Storage will be able to stream and download files bought via Amazon until early next year, while user-uploaded tracks sitting in a locker will be deleted at the end of this month.