As if the music-streaming wars weren’t oversaturated enough, throw Amazon into the ring. Reuters reports that Amazon is preparing to launch its own stand-alone paid music-streaming service, possibly as soon as this summer or early fall. The premium service would cost $9.99 per month — the same as Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal — and feature “competitive catalogs of songs.” Amazon already offers limited music streaming to paying Prime customers, but this would mark the first time Amazon had created a spinoff service specifically for music streaming. The move is said to be a promotional tool for Amazon’s Echo speaker, which is apparently doing so well that Google made its own competing version. (Before Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine folded Beats Music into Apple Music, it, too, was meant to be an extension of the Beats speakers.) Just in March, SoundCloud debuted its own paid subscription service — so at this rate, expect to have to choose from at least 100 music services by the year’s end.
