Great value music streaming with high-quality audio and a huge library
One-minute review
Over the years, Amazon has launched several different streaming services. The best, which competes with the likes of Spotify and Apple Music, is Amazon Music HD.
This is a high-quality music service to rival audiophile-grade services, like Tidal, at a great value price. It brings users lossless FLAC audio at 24-bit/192kHz, while many other services only offer 320kbps. Amazon recently announced that Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers can now upgrade to the high-quality streaming audio – which used to be reserved for Amazon Music HD subscribers – for free.
If you have Amazon Prime, you get a discount (it’s $7.99 / £7.99 / AU$6.99 per month rather than $9.99 / £9.99 / AU$11.99 per month), and Amazon Music HD has good Alexa integration. That means if you already use Amazon and its products, this music streaming service makes a lot of sense. Even if you don’t, this is a good value option with hi-res audio and a solid library of tunes.
What is Amazon Music HD?
Amazon Music HD is a music streaming service from Amazon. But things can get confusing because it isn’t the only music streaming service Amazon offers.
There’s also Amazon Music Prime, which brings Amazon Prime members free music streaming of more than two million songs.
If that’s not enough, you can subscribe to Amazon Music Unlimited – this is an extra payment, even if you’re a Prime member. Think of this as music streaming lite. With a membership, you can access more than 70 million tracks, listen to them ad-free, and download them for offline use.
Then there’s Amazon Music HD. Think of this as a premium add-on to Amazon Music Unlimited, which brings you all the benefits of a music streaming service, along with CD-quality audio and many Ultra HD audio files.
Amazon Music has said that from now on, its high-quality streaming tier is going to be available to all Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers without an accompanying price hike.
Amazon’s announcement came on the same day as Apple’s. The brand announced a slew of upgrades to its Apple Music streaming service, including Spatial Audio with support for Dolby Atmos and the ability to listen to over 75 million tracks in Lossless Audio.
This means both Apple Music and Amazon Music might soon be the only music streaming services to offer hi-res audio as a standard and at no extra cost to subscribers to their current music streaming offerings. This will give them both a leg up over the competition, like Tidal and Deezer, which charge a premium for similar quality.
