Hello world my name is Francisco, fcoterroba on the Internet and today I’m bringing you a post where I’m going to give my first opinion on Amazon Music Unlimited, the music streaming platform with which Amazon wants to compete against Tidal, iTunes, Spotify and the long etcetera of options we have regarding music today. Which one do you use and why? Do you think it’s good that there’s so much competition? Leave me your opinion in the comments. 🙂
I personally have been using Spotify for 3 years but my membership ended just when I saw a quarterly promotion of free Amazon Music Unlimited so I decided to try Amazon’s service. And here I bring you my first impressions:
Before starting, I must say that this couldn’t have been possible without the help of the guys from CholloBoom. It’s a Telegram channel with almost 10,000 members where the best prices are compiled to save on our purchases. Thanks guys! 😊
On April 3rd they posted a notice that Amazon Music Unlimited would be free for 3 months for Amazon users who have never tried this service before.
Registration on the platform, if you already have an Amazon account doesn’t take more than a minute. You simply have to click on the link and start listening to your favorite music.
WEB PLATFORM
The first thing we see when entering is that its web application in terms of design, is not very modern, it seems somewhat “rough”. The icons are too large for what we’re used to and a small test to personalize our taste is missing so it doesn’t show us run-of-the-mill music.
I’m going to try first to play one of the new songs. Specifically, “Si tú la quieres”. A song by David Bisbal and Aitana with quite a controversy for its simplicity when designing the cover.
When we play the song (more than decent sound quality), a playlist is automatically created that doesn’t seem to have much musical correlation between them beyond being the top songs in Spain currently.
Let’s keep in mind that Amazon, the great American company, launched its streaming platform to the market to compete with the big ones by bringing an attempt at simplicity to Amazon users. They seek that from the most experienced user to the most novice, they use their way of listening to music.
Once this is known, the controls for music, despite being simple, are not intuitive for people with little computing knowledge. The most basic controls like pausing and playing the next song are at hand but the standard desktop user has to rack their brain to find the way to play a song from an exact second, set a loop method or even delete songs from the current playlist.
In addition, the web application unlike Spotify web, which allows using all keyboard functions, Amazon only allows the keyboard shortcut to pause, doesn’t recognize the function to go to the next song or go back to the previous one. Also Windows 10 shows a bit more information about the song in Spotify than in Amazon.
ANDROID APP
The mobile app, as expected, is available both on Android and Apple (only for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV).
Once downloaded, we realize that the login screen is very poor. No material design, wasted space, incompatibility with Google’s password manager. And this is just the entry to the application, it should be more cared for because it gives a bad image.
The loading time on the first opening, a Friday at 6:00 PM was relatively slow with a 7MBps WiFi connection.
When I saw the movement that some confetti made on the loading screen I started to think that inside the application would be more cared for in terms of design. Nothing further from reality.
After playing music for an hour on the web, Amazon still hadn’t been able to propose songs based on my tastes. We’ll have to see how it evolves but initially, the algorithms, artificial intelligence and the assistant asking my musical tastes to make the experience more pleasant are missing.
CHROMECAST AND GOOGLE HOME
After listening from the mobile to several songs, I stopped to think if Amazon would be able to get along with Google’s home automation ecosystem, being able to play music on Chromecast and Home.
And although the translation isn’t perfect and it’s a bit hidden, it works well.
The Android application also seems somewhat rough, it’s very heavy and slow in several aspects. Including this one. But it works, it works.
IN SUMMARY:
Briefly and after 2 hours of multiplatform use: Amazon Music Unlimited seems to me an option to consider only if you have a large part of your computing ecosystem on Amazon (you use its cloud, you’re Prime, you have hosting on AWS, etc.) If not, there are much better options than this like Spotify, YouTube Music…
Not everything is going to be bad for Amazon. Both in its web version and in the mobile version, it has an interesting display of lyrics synchronized with the song. Something that’s missing in its main competitors.
I still have 3 months left to get the most out of this platform and then I’ll come back to tell you what my final opinion is.
Try Amazon Music Unlimited yourself and tell me what you think!
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