Amazon Music Unlimited vs. Spotify: How Do They Compare?

In the summer of 2015, Apple decided to take on Spotify with Apple Music , a paid music service built into the Music app of iOS. Sixteen months later, Amazon—never one to be left out of the digital playground fun—launched a very similar service, Amazon Music Unlimited.

Music is nothing new to Amazon. It's been selling MP3s for years, while Prime members can access 2 million tracks via Amazon Prime Music. Amazon Music Unlimited expands that catalog to 50 million songs.

The big difference between Spotify and Amazon Music Unlimited is Amazon offers a tier of service for use on one Echo device for $3.99 per month. Just ask Alexa to start a free trial. To use it on more than one Echo or on other devices, Prime members pay $7.99 per month or $79 per year; a family plan costs $14.99 per month or $149 per year. Non-Prime members pay $9.99 per month.

Access via Alexa also features something called Side-by-Sides, which is sort of like a DVD commentary from an artist played along with a music track.

Just how does Amazon's service compare to Spotify? Here's a breakdown.

	Amazon Music Unlimited	Spotify
Founded	October 2016 in the US	October 2008 in Stockholm
Cost	$9.99/month for non-Prime customers $7.99/month or $79/year for Prime Members $3.99/month for Prime Members with an Amazon Echo	$9.99/month for Premium; free, ad-supported tier
Family Plan	6 accounts for $14.99/month or $149/year	6 accounts for $14.99 per month
Free trial	30 days	30 days
Requires mobile app	No	No
How many countries	46	79
Works with Alexa	Yes, search for music by artist, lyric, mood, decade, etc.	Yes
Number of users	Amazon will only say it has "tens of millions" of paid users	217 million active, 100 million paid Recommended by Our Editors First Listen: Audible's New Harry Potter Audiobook Is a Nostalgia Trip With a Modern Twist
Number of music tracks	50 million	50 million+
Internet radio playlist curation	Thousands of Playlists created by Amazon's Music experts, and personalized streaming Stations, plus live audio streams of Bundesliga soccer matches	Human-curated and algorithmic playlists, like Discover Weekly, a special playlist delivered every Monday
Sound quality	256Kbps; users can pick lower bitrate on mobile apps	Varies based on device
Supported devices	Click here	Click here
Podcasts	Yes	Yes
Videos	No (try Amazon Video)	Allegedly, but hard to find
Taylor Swift	Yes	Yes (after a little begging)

For more, check out our picks for Best Online Music Streaming Services.

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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Amazon Music Unlimited vs. Spotify: How Do They Compare?

The big difference between Spotify and Amazon Music Unlimited is Amazon offers an affordable tier of service available on just one Echo device. Here's how else they differ.