Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)’s Prime Music service has been launched this Thursday and it has not been able to generate a lot of hype and excitement from the user community. Let’s find out what industry analysts and experts feel about this music streaming service of the e-commerce giant.
Henry Blodget, Business Insider CEO & editor-in-chief was on CNBC’s Squawk Alley recently and he was looking very positive and optimistic about the Prime package as a whole. Blodget felt that the music streaming service comes free with the Prime package of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) and when the company would launch the rumored 3D smartphone soon, the package would be more than handy for any books lover who has interest in movies and music too. He also said that this music streaming option with the other services makes the prime package fit well and this also fits well with Kindle. However he said that Prime Music won’t even compete with Spotify. Here is what he said about Prime:
“It’s not intended to kill anybody else and it’s not as good if you stack it up next to Spotify, but it’s just more in the Amazon product bundle giving you value for that $99 you’re paying them”
CNBC’s Jon Fortt was asked if the addition of music streaming to Prime package was enough to move the needle and he said that it’s enough to keep the needle from moving backwards. Now that tells a lot of things about the newly launched service. Fortt continued to say that the service is only good if someone wants to listen to the music of 90s and with a smile on his face he said he loves the music of 90s.
However Prime music just has got 1 million songs and lot of popular artists like Kanye, Jay-Z, Katy Perry would be missing because Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) didn’t sign an agreement with UMG and hence the company loses the fans of these popular artists already. A lot of analysts feel that the service comes nowhere near to ITunes, Pandora or Spotify.
Gene Munster, MD of Piper Jaffray was on CNBC later that day and he went on to call the Prime Music service as a joke. He compared it’s collection of songs with Spotify’s one and said that 1 million songs don’t stand a chance against 20 million. Munster also said that over a period of time, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) might make it better as they have done with Prime Instant video but it’s not usable currently.
Munster went on saying that Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) spends so much on its services and this launch doesn’t impact its finance much so Prime Music can be seen as an extension to the Prime story and that it would become more measurable in the next few years. Munster also said that as per Piper Jaffray’s analysis Prime grows about 40% per year, which is very good and the biggest reason for most people to get Prime is the “Free 2 Day Shipping”.
So the judgment as the analysts see it is that to launch a serious music streaming service, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) should have signed all the major music labels and without those it won’t be going anywhere. Those who already like Prime won’t abandon the service as they are getting an added benefit for free, however, it’s not going to excite a new user to register for Prime just for the music part of it.
Disclosure: None
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