Apple's betting it’s a feature, better off rolled into something like an Apple One subscription, more of a marketing engine than a profitable enterprise on its own. The big question here: Is audio a business or a feature? Spotify, Clubhouse and others are betting it's a business. It wouldn't take much to combine Audible with Music, and maybe even Prime Video, for a pretty powerful media subscription. Audible is a wholly separate thing from Amazon Music, which obviously started with audiobooks but more recently has added podcasts to the platform and funded its own "Audible Originals," which are just, well, podcasts. It’s already experimenting with this, like in December’s Kanye West concert where viewers could preorder his merch right through the Amazon Music app.Īnd then there's Audible. And, of course, as the creator economy continues to boom, Amazon wants musicians and podcasters to use its tools to sell stuff, like Twitch streamers already do.Amazon's also a fast-growing advertising business, and audio ads are a fast-growing business.Alexa will help Amazon get a lot of those deals, which become wins for Amazon Music. Even Spotify's Daniel Ek admitted that Spotify was "not that differentiated" and was struggling to make deals with hardware partners. And like Microsoft bundling Teams to destroy Slack, Amazon can bundle Music with Alexa and make inroads practically anywhere. Amazon Music integration is a reason people buy Alexa speakers, and music in general is the main reason people use them.But Amazon seems to treat Amazon Music like it does Prime Video: a good service on its own, but a killer one as part of a Prime subscription.Īudio suits a lot of Amazon's needs, actually: As Spotify and others are finding, the economics of the audio business are rough and not getting easier. Amazon's serious about being a media company in general.Īmazon has a big advantage here: It doesn't really need to make money from audio. Amazon spent a total of $13 billion on content last year, and while most of that is video, it's up $2 billion from its 2020 spend.Audioboom makes shows like "F1: Beyond the Grid" and "Dark History." And, of course, it paid a reported $300 million for Wondery in 2020 and acquired the hosting and advertising platform Art19 last year. It's interested in buying Audioboom, Sky News reported this weekend.It made similar deals with podcasts like "SmartLess" and "My Favorite Murder.” Just last week, it made a deal with Guy Raz to publish episodes of "How I Built This" on Amazon a week before they're available elsewhere.
Amazon has also been making a string of deals to bring podcasts to the platform.YouTube Music is actually the fastest-growing service on the market, but it's not quite as competitive as Amazon Music yet. But Amazon is growing faster than either one. That puts it in third, behind Spotify (31%) and Apple (15%). Amazon Music owns 13% of the music-streaming market, according to Midia Research.For starters, it's already bigger than you think: And then, way down below, there's Tidal and Deezer and Pandora and SoundCloud and YouTube Music and SiriusXM and countless others.īut Amazon might be the company to watch in the audio wars. It's easy to see streaming as a two-horse race. But if users do leave Spotify, where will they go? All of Spotify's competitors should send Joe Rogan a gift basket, really. In the last couple of weeks, a lot of people have found themselves Googling things like "best music service not Spotify." Things like #deletespotify have trended repeatedly.
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