Australian technology news, reviews, and guides to help you
Australian technology news, reviews, and guides to help you

Amazon Music gets a free streaming tier

It’s not just Spotify or Sonos that gets sound to your eardrums for free, as Amazon adds support, as well.

Sometimes it’s nice to see companies get behind the idea of “free”. When you get something for free, there’s often a nice feeling to it, and it’s even better if you can enjoy it yourself.

That’s definitely true of free music, because if you can some how skip on paying for a service on the proviso that you might have to survive an ad or two, free can make it well worth it. At least until it annoys you enough to want to fork out money to kill those ads.

There are services already that handle that for us, though. There’s free music on Spotify with ads supporting the service, and there’s even free Beats 1 radio on Apple. If you have a Sonos system, you’ve recently gained access to free music with ads with Sonos Radio, so there are definitely options.

In fact, Australia has one more this week, as Amazon’s own music service joins the assortment, delivering free ad-supported music in the Amazon Music app, as well as to owners of the Amazon Alexa-enabled speakers, such as those in the Echo range.

The ad-supported tier launches this week in Australia and plays nicely with the Alexa voice assistant, allowing you to call out what you want to listen to and having the assistant do it for you.

The range of music isn’t like Spotify’s approach, however, which can let you load any song in the library into a playlist, but may play it out of order in shuffle. Instead, Amazon Music’s free tier includes a selection of top playlists and stations, and doesn’t appear to be the same smorgasbord of sound Spotify offers in its free tier.

However the good news here is that anyone with an iOS or Android device can try it, as can owners of Echo speakers and Alexa-compatible speakers. It’s rolling out now, so if you have one of the above, you can simply try it by grabbing the app and kicking off that free tier.

Amazon Echo Dot (2019)

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