Giving Amazon Prime Music another chance

I’m not completely sold on switching from Rdio to Spotify just yet. I won’t deny Spotify is a great service, but I really don’t like their app. Before deciding whether or not I should pay, I figured I would give Amazon Prime Music another shot. I’m a Prime member, so it’s free. I’ve been using it for about a week and a half now, and there’s no denying the service has gotten much better.

Last time I tried Prime, the selection wasn’t great and there were tons of missing feature. Since then Amazon has added a Queue feature, a Spotlight feature that’s actually relevant, ad-free Prime stations with unlimited skips, and personalized recommendations.

The selection still doesn’t come close to rivaling that of Spotify, but I figured if I could use Amazon Prime for most of my offline or on-demand listening, I could just use Spotify on shuffle (for free) and my local music in the Music app to fill in the blanks.

Where Amazon Prime Music delivers

I immediately noticed that Amazon has done quite a bit of work under the hood to play and suggest things that are actually relevant to me. Last time, I was hearing country music in an Ellie Goulding playlist, or Justin Bieber in a trance playlist. Not cool, Amazon. I’m glad you’re working on this.

The sections of the app are also easily accessible with swipes and are much more robust than they were on my last encounter. Stations were relevant to what I listened to and adding tracks to playlists were always just a tap or two away (tip: you can tap on the album cover to get easy access to options).

Lyrics are also provided via X-Ray right under the album cover art. Just slide up and you instantly have access to lyrics. While they aren’t available for every track in Prime Music, they’re available for a good amount. In a week and a half, I’ve only stumbled on about 5-7 songs that I didn’t see lyrics for.

The first time I tried using Amazon Prime Music, recommendations weren’t a thing yet. Now they are, and they’re fairly decent. Apple Music does a better job, but I’m still finding things I like.

One feature Apple Music now has me accustomed to is Up Next, or as Amazon calls it, the Play Queue feature. The Play Queue is accessible in almost every menu which makes it easy to add tracks, or whole albums. To view your Play Queue, just access the player and tap the overflow menu at the top. From here you can view the queue, edit it, and reorder it.

The Play Queue in Amazon Prime Music is dead simple to use and something that I’ve really come to depend on. It’s one thing I’ve never really thought Rdio was very good at. While I could choose Play Later on mobile, there was no way to access the queue (unless I’ve been overlooking something for years). You can in the Mac app but since I play Rdio through Sonos, that wasn’t very useful to me since I just used Sonos’ playlist queue, which allowed me to queue up songs across multiple services in the same list. On the go, it was a problem.

It’s also worth mentioning that Amazon Prime Music was recently added to the long list of supported Sonos services, which is probably important to anyone that relies on Sonos for music playback at home. If that’s a concern of yours, Sonos and Amazon have you covered.

What Amazon Prime Music is still missing

The biggest thing you’ll notice with Amazon Prime Music is that it doesn’t always have the latest and greatest albums available. There are a few new release albums I’ve been listening to lately that I couldn’t find on Amazon Prime Music. Spotify does have them though and I was ok adding them and just listening to them on shuffle, with ads.

Just like Spotify, the app itself could still use some help. Then again, I’ve been spoiled by Rdio for all these years so my expectations are fairly high. I actually like the way Apple Music is laid out and if it wasn’t so maddenginly flawed in other ways I’d probably stick with it. But since Amazon Prime Music comes to me completely free of charge since I’m already a Prime member, I’m willing to overlook some interface issues, but it’s something to keep in mind if that’s important to you.

I also have issues scrubbing through songs in Amazon Prime Music. Whenever I try and drag my finger on the progress bar, it always triggers the lyrics section instead. This is a pretty annoying interface issue I’d really like to see Amazon address fairly quickly (yes, I’ll be reporting it).

The cost of Amazon Prime Music

If you aren’t a Prime member and use Amazon frequently, you’re missing out. I’d highly recommend considering the 30-day free trial of Prime Music. If you like it, consider a Prime membership. Aside from Amazon Prime Music, you also get access to Amazon Video and more importantly, free 2-day shipping on many Amazon items (most of them, actually).

A Prime membership is $99 a year, which averages out to less than $9 a month, which is less than what you’d pay for a standalone streaming service. The additional benefits of Amazon Prime make Prime Music a great value for many folks.

So is Amazon Prime Music replacing Rdio for me?

I think the short-term answer to that is yes.

Over the long-term, that’ll depend. I am willing to hold off on paying for Spotify until we find out what Pandora is planning to do with Rdio. I’ve always enjoyed Pandora and they still do random playlists better than any other service, even with a much smaller catalog than Spotify and Rdio.

I’d be interested in knowing if part of what Pandora acquired is Rdio’s license deals. If they can combine the selection, on-demand capabilities, and stellar interface of Rdio with their own playlist and curation alorithms, I think we’re all in for a real treat.

Until then, I think I’ll stick it out with Amazon Prime Music.