Amazon now offers free music streaming to Prime subscribers

With free two-day shipping, free ebooks, unlimited movies, and other perks, Amazon’s Prime service is a great deal at $99, especially if you shop frequently online and you don’t mind waiting a bit for your orders.

Now Prime becomes even more attractive with the addition of Prime Music, an unlimited, ad-free streaming service that Amazon took the wraps off today. Only available in the US for now, Prime Music offers over a million songs, which sounds like a large catalog, but is actually small compared to the catalogs of Spotify and other competing streaming services.

However, Prime Music shines when it comes to the freedom it gives users – there are no restrictions on what songs you can play or on the number of skips, there are no ads to pester you to upgrade, and you can download all your tracks for offline listening. The service is available across platforms – Kindle Fire tablets, Android devices, iOS devices, PCs and Macs.

At no additional cost, Prime Music is another perk that Amazon’s using to draw users to its subscription service. The service lacks the rich catalog of competitors and many recent hits are not available for streaming. Still, for many users, especially those who prefer older tunes, it may be good enough. Amazon is trying to compensate for the smaller catalog with hundreds of handmade playlists, with themes as diverse as “Bollywood Newies”, “Chemically-Altered Country”, and “Hard Beats, Hard Body”. And there’s always the option to buy tracks that are not available for streaming.

Amazon re-launched its iOS Cloud Player app as Amazon Music, and we expect to see a similar rebranding for Amazon’s Android music app. Head over here to sign up for Prime or start listening, if you’re already a customer.