Cyrus Langhorne
Apple Music subscribers will finally get to hear their favorite tunes on their Amazon smart speakers. The tech giant has reached a deal with the popular digital retailer – with a few strings attached – to allow its tunes to stream through Amazon Echo devices.
According to reports, the new deal is set to go into full motion beginning December 17.
If you have an Apple Music account and have connected it to your smart speaker in the Alexa app, the speakers will be able to play music on demand. Just say, for instance, “Alexa, play Baby Shark on Apple Music.” Apple’s $9.99 a month music subscription service will join Spotify, Pandora, iHeartRadio, Amazon’s own music service, and other options on Alexa devices. Apple is careful about access to its services outside of its own ecosystem, especially when it’s on a device that competes with an Apple product — in this case, the HomePod. (CNN Business)
The power move by both Apple and Amazon is a sign of tensions steadily fading away.
“They’ve had an on-again, off-again tussle over things like whether Kindle readers can read Kindle books on the iPad, and then years later it was whether you could buy Apple TV devices on Amazon,” says James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research. “But that freeze between the two companies has been thawing a bit.” (Wired)
Some reports claim the popularity of smart speakers is on the steady rise.
Smart speakers have also eclipsed the small market for tabletop streaming radios such as this one. Three recent studies show that the popularity of smart speakers for music listening is amazingly high, and getting even higher: a July study by Kantar Media found that 64% of smart speaker owners use it for music; an August study by Adobe Analytics put the figure at 70%, and an October study by AudienceNet for the Music Business Association put it at 74%. (Forbes)
Since launching in June 2015, Apple Music has continued to build a steady amount of paying subscribers.
The company cracked 50 million subscribers earlier this year. That’s still well behind the 83 million paid subscribers Spotify announced back in July, but this addition should help give Amazon an added advantage against Google’s Home devices, particularly here in the States, where the bulk of Apple Music subscribers reside. (Tech Crunch)
