The e-commerce giant Amazon has two streaming music services: Amazon Music Unlimited and Amazon Prime Music. But what’s the difference between Prime Music and Amazon Music Unlimited and which is the right one for you? Unlike the comparisons between Spotify and Amazon Music, or Apple Music and Amazon Music, Prime Music and Amazon Music Unlimited look similar on their main interface, and also share similar features including 30-day trial, catalog of 100M songs, curated playlists, stations, and so on. Here we will focus on the main differences between Prime Music and Amazon Music Unlimited, so that you can easily tell apart and choose the best service for yourself.
Part 1: The Differences between Amazon Music Unlimited and Prime Music
Part 2: How to Extract Music Files from Prime Music and Music Unlimited
Prime Music is an Amazon Prime membership that benefits featuring 100 million songs and more than a thousand playlists and stations programmed by Amazon's music experts at no additional cost. That is to say, Prime Music is included with your Prime membership. The Prime members pay $14.99/month or $139/year, and they will get variety benefits including Prime Music. The newly updated Amazon Music has shut down the features of on-demand streaming and downloading for offline playback that used to be available for Prime members.
Note: Prime members can only select songs from All-Access Playlists to download them for offline listening. Go get this way to download any songs, albums, and playlists from Amazon Prime for offline playback.
Amazon Music Unlimited is a premium music subscription service featuring over 100 million songs and thousands of expertly crafted playlists and stations. With Amazon Music Unlimited, uses can listen to any song, anytime, anywhere, on all devices including smart phones, tablets, desktop, Amazon Fire TV, and Alexa-powered devices like Amazon Echo. Users need to pay $10.99 per month ($16.99 for family and $5.99 for Echo device owners) to enjoy all the streaming music features, same as Spotify or Apple Music.
What's the difference between these two music streaming options? Let’s take a look.
You can get access to Prime Music by signing up for Amazon Prime which costs $14.99/month or $139/year. The Prime members can also get access to all the other Prime perks, including one-day delivery, Prime Video streaming service and more. It has 30-day trial for sample test to see if it is the right for you.
Just like Spotify and other popular streaming music services, Amazon Music Unlimited also has 3 plans: $10.99 /month for individual, $16.99/month for family package (share with up to 6 family members), and $5.99/for eligible students. What’s more, if you have one Echo device powered by Amazon's own Alexa AI assistant, you can sign up for Amazon Music Unlimited just £3.99 a month, but music playback only works on that device. If you want to receive the full Amazon Music service on your phone and other more devices, you’ll still need to pay for the full tier at $9.99 monthly if you’re a Prime member, or $10.99 if you’re not.
Amazon now offers Prime subscribers a full music catalog with 100 million songs and most of the top podcasts on its service are now available without ads. With Amazon Music Unlimited, you can get access to more than 100 million songs and thousands of playlists and stations, the hottest new releases from today's most popular artists. Amazon Music Unlimited's vast catalog allows you to dig deep into the vaults of your favorite artists, enjoy the latest and greatest hits, and explore new genres and styles.
Prime Music and Amazon Music Unlimited are streamed via the same app. You just need to download Amazon Music app on your desktop, mobile phone, Amazon Fire TV or Ruku, then sign in with your Amazon Prime or Amazon Music Unlimited account. The app works same as the most of streaming music services: big banner for its exclusives of featured song, artists, albums or playlists, browse, recommendations, stations, curated playlists and store. And you can create your own playlists to sort and organize music library, but the pity is that the ability to upload your local music was resigned.
Amazon Music works on nearly all smart phones, tablets and smart speakers in the market. What's more, if you have Amazon's Alexa-powered smart speakers, like Echo, Amazon Music undoubtedly the best option. Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, and Amazon Tap owners only pay just $5.99 per month to subscribe Amazon Music Unlimited. If you want to stream on multiple smart speakers, you need to pay the regular $10.99 per month fee.
If you care the new releases from your favorite artist, you will need Amazon Music Unlimited to access larger music library (more personalized and curated playlists or exclusives from famous artists like Garth Brooks, Chris Gaines and more). And if you are causal when listening to music, Amazon Prime is still a perfect fit for you: Amazon has announced there are no longer limited catalog on Prime Music which have been open to only two million catalogues in the past.
And if you're a Prime subscriber already, and have an Echo smart speaker, Amazon Music Unlimited is the best option. It will save $2 per month compared to the subscription to Spotify or Apple Music, but it also the best service which is made for the speakers and home AI-assistance.
Both Prime Music and Amazon Music Unlimited provide millions of songs to stream on multiple devices. Downloading Amazon Music for offline streaming is now only avaiable for Unlimited subscribers. And if you are Prime member who want to bring back download feature for offline playback and get rid of the shuffle-play mode, you will need to pay $9.99 per month to sign up for Amazon Music Unlimited individual plan. You already made a huge collection of music on Amazon Music app, and you wanna know the way extract or download music files from Amazon Music Unlimited service before your Amazon Music Unlimited membership expires.
The fact is that Amazon has refused Amazon Music users to download songs for offline listening. Moreover, the files you download from Amazon Music Unlimited are encrypted and can't be played on anything else than the authorized devices. You will need a tool – Sidify Amazon Music Converter to handle Amazon Music files and convert them to MP3, AAC, FLAC, WAV, AIFF or ALAC files. To its credit, Sidify brings chance for Prime users to download Amazon Music!
Now let's take a look at how to extract or download music files from Prime Music and Music Unlimited with Sidify Amazon Music Converter.
If you are looking for a tool to convert any streaming music (such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, Deezer, YouTube, YouTube Music, SoundCloud, DailyMotion …) to MP3, Sidify All-In-One is the go-to choice.
Step 1Choose Conversion Mode
Install and open Sidify Amazon Music Converter, and then you can choose App Mode as conversion mode.
Select the [App Mode], and you can see the main interface of Sidify as below. At the same time, the Amazon Music app would be launched automatically.
Step 2Add Amazon Music to Sidify.
Drag songs or playlists from the Amazon Music app into Sidify. Sidify would automatically recognize and list them. Select the songs you want to save as MP3 files to your computer and then press the Add button.
Step 3Customize the Output Settings
Click the Settings section on the left bar to customize the output settings: Output Format (Auto/MP3/AAC/FLAC/WAV/AIFF/ALAC), Output Quality and Output Path.
Step 4Start Conversion
Click on "Convert" button to start converting the songs from Amazon Music to the output format you have chosen. Once the conversion is completed, you can find the converted Amazon Music songs by clicking the Converted tab.
With the 4 simple steps, you will get songs from Amazon Music downloaded as MP3/AAC/FLAC/WAV/AIFF/ALAC, thus you can keep all your playlist before the membership expired and stream Amazon Music on other more portable devices like MP3 player, SD card or USB drive.
Hanna Ellis | Content Writer
