“It will probably have little impact on the established players – Spotify has incredible loyalty with its listeners and I don’t see people marching off to Amazon because it’s going to have a free tier. Amazon has a much more casual audience – it’s large, but they spend much fewer hours [on the platform] and are generally less engaged with music. The desired side-effect is to hook buyers on Alexa, which in turn boosts sales of Amazon’s core products by encouraging voice ordering. Amazon’s free music tier, initially anyway, is a less-attractive offering compared to Spotify’s ad-supported service. “Amazon’s free music tier may dampen [other streaming services’] future growth a bit,” he concludes, “but it won’t be a game-changer.”Yet like most everything that Amazon does, it offers formidable prospects for the company’s growth.

Source: The Star April 19, 2019 06:22 UTC