There are three tiers of Amazon’s music streaming service with various plans available. We explain the difference between Free, Prime and Unlimited
If you’re already embedded into the Amazon ecosystem, or have one or more Echo or Fire TV devices, then you’re probably well aware of Amazon Prime Music. One reason for that is that many songs have lyrics that can be shown in time with the music on your TV, in the Alexa app or on your Echo Show smart display.
Many people think the service is called Prime Music, but that’s only one of three tiers available and is the most limited and Amazon actually calls it Music Prime.
Amazon launched Music HD back in 2019 which offered CD-quality (or better) audio for those who want something other than compressed MP3 quality as well as a selection of ‘3D’ music that can be enjoyed on a speaker such as the Amazon Echo Studio.
However, in May 2021, Amazon rolled this into the Unlimited tier, ironically on the same day that Apple launched Hi-Fi and spatial streaming.
This means there’s a choice to make and also a selection of plans for Unlimited users to choose from. Here we’ll explain them all so you can see the difference between Prime and Unlimited tiers.Do Amazon Prime members get Amazon Music free?
Yes, but this isn’t the same thing as Amazon Music Unlimited or Music Free so you need to choose which one you’d like:
Amazon Music Free
Amazon Music Prime
Amazon Music Unlimited
So how do they compare? As the Prime part suggests, the first service is included as part of an Amazon Prime membership which costs £95/US$139 per year and gives you access to around 2 million songs, a fraction of the 90 million songs you get with Amazon Music Unlimited, which requires its only monthly cost (see full price table below).
You can play any song on demand, offline and with unlimited skips on all-access playlists – skips are on other parts of the platform
As mentioned earlier, Music HD has now been made free for Unlimited users effectively making it just a part of that service.
