The full catalog of 100 million songs in Amazon Music to Prime subscribers will be free. Many of the company's in-house podcasts are available in the app. If you want Amazon Music to be a serious competitor to Apple Music, you will need a separate subscription.

It's all about access. All Prime members will be able to access the entire Amazon Music catalog, but not fully on demand; you can shuffle any artist, album, or playlist, but you can't just pick a song and hit play. If you want to play songs in higher fidelity or with spatial audio, you will need a monthly subscription to Amazon Music. It is not known which ones will be available on demand and offline. Amazon Music isn't free anymore, but it's still a free service with no ads for anyone who already pays for Prime.

Getting rid of ads seems to have been a focus for Amazon, as it is making a lot of its podcasts available ad-free to Prime subscribers. The New York Times will be ad-free as well. What do consumers want when we speak to them? Steve Boom, Amazon's VP of Amazon Music, spoke to Nilay Patel. All the ads are what they don't like about podcasts. We wanted to build a great catalog of stuff that people like to listen to.

Amazon is working on more than one thing. It is rolling out a new feature that looks like a trailer for a show. You will be able to listen to a short, digestible soundbite before diving into an episode. Amazon says that it is a personalized and "swipeable" experience based on what you listen to. It's a good idea to use the dating app to listen to podcasts.

If they work, it could be a big step in the right direction. A reason to use one app over another is a rare thing in the world of podcasts. Amazon signed deals to get shows early and run them without ads in order to figure out that exclusive shows aren't the ticket to success. Better discovery tools could make some people shift their listening habits.

Everything else is dependent on the Prime subscription.

Much of what it launches is designed to convince more people to pay $139 a year for a Prime membership. Those who are not likely to ever spend a dime on a music service will be the ones who will benefit from the free tier, according to Boom. It is the same reason that Amazon paid a lot of money for Thursday Night Football and MGM: it wants more people in the system.

Music has been seen as a gateway to other things. You can buy artists' merchandise right from the Amazon Music app, many are starting to do live concerts through twitch, and Amazon is also growing fast as an advertising giant, all of which will benefit from the huge numbers of fans who will listen to their favorite artists any way they can. Few companies are better suited to sell ads and then sell mattresses from those ads.

The third largest player in the music streaming market is Amazon Music. The market is going to get more difficult as the market grows and with TikTok rumored to launch a music service of its own. Amazon is all-in on audio as it continues to push into live audio with Amp. Few companies are doing it as aggressively as Amazon is.