I’ll just a say little thing here, if Spotify IPOs don’t be shocked to start seeing more stories about the rise of Amazon Music and the fact that Apple Music might actually be making some headway with paid subscribers. Just a thought.
Now let’s look at some 2018 headlines about Apple Music:
Spotify and Apple Music are far and away the dominant forces in streaming music. That said, the two powerhouses, which once held over 90% of the market, are ceding share to other services as total streams this year have increased by nearly 40%. The two services now have a combined 75% of total streams. Wonderers have wondered who the next major player might be.
Perhaps most notably, Amazon’s marketshare appears to be growing. According to label insiders, Amazon’s Prime Music and Music Unlimited can now claim 9% of the streaming market.
Unsurprisingly a couple weeks after this report,
Amazon announced its first national TV for Amazon Music. The tagline was: “A Voice Is All You Need.” I’ll be blunt Amazon Music isn’t an interesting music streaming platform, but its ecosystem is. There are tens of millions of Amazon Prime subscribers, so why not just use Amazon Music and get access to essentially the same catalog for a cheaper fee. Or perhaps you’re one of the millions of people that own an Amazon smart speaker, which are primarily used for music anyway, so why not just use Amazon Music. The opportunities for Amazon are fairly obvious, so let’s get a bit more into specifics.
Now to start, please do ignore all marketing with faces likes
Anderson .Paak or
Future promoting Amazon products, because they don’t represent the music being used on the service. Instead the most popular songs are in genres like rock, country, and even pure pop, which are often forgotten in the streaming revolution narrative. There is even a children’s song like “Baby Shark”
currently in Amazon Music’s top 10, which again shows the particular market that Amazon Music is reaching at the moment. The charts look far closer to the contemporary iTunes charts, where genres like rap and r&b are underrepresented compared to Apple Music or Spotify charts.
Amazon Music’s customers aren’t the Apple Music fan running to stream the latest Drake album or the YouTube fan who subscribes to a dozen EDM channels. Instead they appear to be slightly older, more interested in soundtrack music, and non-black genres. That’s why in a sense it makes sense Amazon Music targeted smaller indie artists (Soccer Mommy, Snail Mail) to record exclusive Amazon Music only tracks and some of Amazon’s earliest music ventures were with country stars. Now, while I highly doubt any of these artists fan bases care about Amazon Music, similar to Amazon funding a Jay Som Music video last year, but rock music, at the moment, appears to be a more natural home at Amazon Music. Now before record labels further commit to Amazon, I’ll repeat a bit of caution I’ve said before.
The more Amazon Music eats the pie of western and in its dreams Indian music streaming, record label should be on guard. One only looks at to look at the recent fuckshit of Amazon’s parading around its second headquarters across the country only to gain country on major American cities and then announce they’ll just move to New York City and right outside of Washington D.C. I fully expect that Amazon would be fighting for the lowest royalties rates when the time is eventually right for them. They aren’t a music company, they don’t even pay lip service to act like they deeply care about music, unlike an Apple, Spotify, SoundCloud, etc. Amazon’s chief motive, like all companies, is to extract as much profits as possible but the company at least holds the guise of helping the consumer.