On Thurday, Amazon announced a new benefit for Prime members: streaming music. Although this service hardly a challenge to Spotify, Pandora and the like, it is more of a benefit added service:

With Prime Music, Prime members have unlimited, ad-free access to over a million songs at no additional cost to their membership. Prime Music includes tens of thousands of albums from top artists like Daft Punk, P!nk, Bruno Mars, Blake Shelton, The Lumineers,Bruce Springsteen and Madonna. And we’re just getting started—more music is being added all the time. Prime members can choose exactly which songs and albums to listen to, or they can sit back and listen to hundreds of expert-programmed Prime Playlists. Discovering music is easy thanks to Amazon’s personalized recommendations. Music fans will find tons of music they’ll love, from Grammy winners to indie breakout singers, along with a huge music catalog that can easily be combined with their own collection. Prime members can also download songs from the Prime Music catalog to their mobile devices for offline playback on planes, trains and anywhere they’re without an internet connection.¹

Though, certainly, this is a viable service, Prime Music seems to be aimed at those people who are on the fence about signing up for Prime, more than a standalone service. The new platform seems to be sort of a mix between Spotify and Songza, mixing in several different features. Prime Music incorporates both the ability to choose a pre-made playlist based on mood, and the ability to build your own music collection.

Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon made a statement about the new service:

Today we’re introducing Prime Music—more than a million songs from some of music’s best artists, plus hundreds of expert-programmed Prime Playlists, all at no additional cost. Prime Music is the latest great addition for Prime members and we think they’re going to love it.²

Prime Music probably won’t compete with the likes of Spotify or Pandora, but it doesn’t really need to.