I have spent the last few weeks looking at Amazon Music using the free month trial. Or you can subscribe to Amazon music to access a library of around 70 million tracks. This review is based on my experiences of subscribing to the Amazon music service individual plan, which is currently £7.99 in the UK. Family plans are also available.
Music quality
Amazon Music offers all its tracks up to CD quality streaming which Amazon calls HD. With a large selection of tracks available at higher streaming rates of up to 24 bits at 192Khz. Our introduction to digital music formats provides more information.
I have tested Amazon music using both the Android and Windows application, and on both applications, the default setting was standard quality. I had to change this setting to ensure that I listened to the music at the highest quality setting.
The actual quality you hear will also depend on your hardware. Don’t expect anything better than standard while listening to music over Bluetooth.
While checking out the Amazon music services, I also noticed that some tracks were available in Dolby Atmos.
Music Discovery
Amazon offers some services to help you discover new music, including the following.
- A weekly discovery playlist
- A number of playlists for different genres and for the latest release
- A number of radio stations for the different genres
User Interface
I find the Amazon music user interface to be very clunky both on the Windows and Android apps. The design is similar, but I was disappointed to find that I couldn’t open up information on the song in the Android app.
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Music quality
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Music discovery
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User Interface
Summary
The music quality, on the whole, was excellent, especially when streaming HiFi quality music. The ability to discover new music was okay but not as good as those offered by other streaming services.