Amazon’s new Amazon Prime Music service sounds astonishingly good, with ad-free music on and off-line for Prime subscribers. I wouldn’t hold your breath for the service to launch in Australia, however.
The service relies on having an existing Amazon Prime service, and that’s something that Amazon has never actually launched in Australia. Whenever Amazon has been queried about the kinds of rights that would be needed for Prime-style services in Australia, the only comments it has made on the record have related to rights situations in Australia being “difficult”.
You could conceivably hook into Amazon Prime Music via a VPN, but you’d have to do more work than for, say, Netflix, because Amazon is significantly stricter when it comes to addresses and credit cards when it comes to Amazon Prime registration. An Australian credit card generally won’t cut it.
Whether it would be worth the effort is also questionable; while it’s true that no one music service has absolutely everything that everyone wants, there’s a wealth of competing music services in Australia already. As such, if Amazon were to venture into local waters, it seems more likely it would launch with its exclusive TV content rather than try to take on the likes of Spotify, JB HiFi NOW and Rdio.
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3 responses to “No Amazon Prime Music For Australia”
It’s likely not that important unless your musical tastes are limited. Services like Spotify and RDIO boast more than 10 million songs, and even they miss out a lot due to licensing issues.
A mere one million means you are likely to be well served with Justin Beiber and the various “covers by xylophone” that tend to pop up when licensing is tricky.
They boast 10 million globally or in their larger markets. They never advertise what fraction is available in Australia.
The competition is almost exclusively for lower quality compressed music. It would be great if we had some of the services available in Europe and North America that offer CD quality purchases and streaming. The competition is also largely over the same commercial range, without the diversity of material found in other markets. It’s like going to the supermarket and finding that you can only buy one flavour of jam, a low sugary concoction sold under 30 different brands.