Hello world, my name is Francisco, fcoterroba on the Internet and today I bring you a post in which I am going to give my first opinion about Amazon Music Unlimited, the music streaming platform with which Amazon wants to compete against Tidal, iTunes, Spotify and the long list of options we have in terms of music today. Which one do you use and why? Do you think it's good that there is 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 for free Amazon Music Unlimited so I decided to try Amazon's service. And here I bring you my first impressions:
Before we start, I have to say that this could not have been possible without the help of the guys at CholloBoom. It is a Telegram channel with almost 10,000 members in which the best prices are collected to save on our purchases. Thanks guys! 😊
On April 3, they uploaded a notice that Amazon Music Unlimited was going to be free for 3 months for Amazon users who have never tried this service before.
Registration on the platform, if you already have an account Amazon It 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 feels somewhat “rough”. The icons are too large for what we are used to and a small test is missing to customize our taste and not show us ordinary music.
I'm going to try playing one of the new songs first. Specifically, “If you want it.” A song by David Bisbal and Aitana with quite a bit of controversy due to its simplicity when designing the cover.
When we play the song (more than decent sound quality), a playlist is automatically created that does not seem to have much musical correlation between them beyond being the top songs in Spain currently.
Let's keep in mind that Amazon, the large American company, brought its streaming platform to the market to compete with the large companies by bringing an attempt at simplicity to Amazon users. They want everyone from the most experienced user to the most novice to use their way of listening to music.
Once this is known, the music controls, despite being simple, are not very intuitive for people with little computer knowledge. The most basic controls like pausing and playing the next song are close at hand but the standard desktop user has to rack their brains to figure out how to play a song from an exact second, set a loop method or even delete songs from the current playlist.
Also, the web application, unlike Spotify web, which allows you to use all keyboard functions, Amazon only allows the keyboard shortcut to pause, it does not recognize the function to go to the next song or go back to the previous one. Windows 10 also shows a little more information about the song on Spotify than on Amazon.
APP ANDROID
The mobile app, as expected, is both in Android as in 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 entrance to the application, you should be more careful because it gives a bad image.
The loading time on the first opening, on a Friday at 6:00 p.m., 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 careful in terms of design. Nothing more out of reality.
After playing music for an hour on the web, Amazon still hadn't been able to suggest songs based on my tastes. We will have to see how it evolves but at first, we miss the algorithms, the artificial intelligence and the assistant asking my musical tastes to make the experience more enjoyable.
CHROMECAST & GOOGLE HOME
After listening to several songs on my phone, 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 is not perfect and is a bit hidden, it works well.
The Android application also feels a bit rough, it is very heavy and slow in several aspects. Including this one. But it works
IN SHORT:
In summary and after 2 hours of multiplatform use: Amazon Music Unlimited seems like an option to consider only if you have a large part of your computing ecosystem on Amazon (you use their cloud, you are 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 sample of the lyrics synchronized with the song. Something that is missing in its main competitors.
I still have 3 months left to get the most out of this platform and then I will return to tell you what my final opinion is.
You can try too Amazon Music Unlimited and let me know what you think!
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