Amazon Expands Prime Music Catalog By “Hundreds Of Thousands” Of Songs

One of the major complaints with Amazon Prime Music, the company’s new streaming music service bundled in with its Amazon Prime membership program, was its lack of song selection, and especially current hits. Today, Amazon is taking a small step towards remedying that problem with an announcement of an expansion of the Prime Music service, which now has grown by “hundreds of thousands of songs.”

The expansion includes both songs from artists who are new to Prime Music, as well as additional tracks from artists who already offered some content to Prime Music subscribers.

Specifically, the company noted a handful of artists by name in the announcement, including:

David Guetta, Al Green, Miles Davis, Kendrick Lamar, Linkin Park, Shakira, Deadmau5, Ella Fitzgerald, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, Neil Young, DJ Snake & Lil Jon, Young the Giant, A$AP Rocky, Elvis, Oasis, Kacey Musgraves, Ray Charles, Panic! at the Disco, Wyclef Jean, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Skrillex, John Coltrane, and others.

As you can tell by the selection noted above, many of these artists are still not those one would classify as “current,” but nevertheless, they’re at least classic artists whose content should be available in any worthwhile streaming catalog. However, Amazon is still lacking a deal with Universal, whose catalog includes big names like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and Kanye West, for instance.

When the service launched last month, it touted over 1 million songs available for streaming, so this expansion is still rather minor when looking at the big picture of where the streaming music industry stands today. Amazon has to compete with much larger players , like Spotify for example, which currently has a catalog of 20 million songs (with access varying by country.)

But like most of Amazon’s services, incremental improvements are the way it moves into position to compete. For example, with Prime Instant Video, the catalog was also underwhelming to start, but Amazon over time grew it, partnership by partnership, to include more content – just recently scoring a notable deal for HBO shows, in fact.

In addition to the Prime Music catalog expansion, Amazon also announced hundreds of new, “expert-programmed” Prime Playlists were also added.