SEATTLE _ Amazon.com has launched a streaming music service tailored for the emerging age of voice computing _ at a price for Amazon Prime members that undercuts the competition.
Dubbed "Amazon Music Unlimited," it comes with a catalog its makers say rivals that of more established players such as Spotify and Apple Music.
Prime members can get the service for $8 per month, or $79 a year. Those who don't belong to Amazon's growing flock of loyal Prime subscribers would have to pay $10 a month, about the same chief competitors charge.
A third alternative is a $4 monthly subscription for use on a single Echo, the company's popular voice-activated speaker.
At first sight, the service seems to be another sweetener by Amazon to its already perk-loaded Prime program, which for $99 a year also includes guaranteed two-day shipping, streaming video and a limited-catalog streaming music service.
But it's more than that.
By applying to music streaming its knowledge of machine learning, recommendation tools and voice computing, Amazon is creating a formidable alternative to Spotify for the millions of households that have Echo devices.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement that through Echo, the service would provide the curious with a "sense of the future of voice-controlled music." Fine-tuned for interacting with listeners through Alexa, the artificial-intelligence assistant that inhabits the Echo and other devices, the music software can respond to spoken requests for the latest song from a given artist.
It can find music produced by that artist during a specific time period, say, "1980s songs by Irish rock band U2," or "top songs from any given year going back to the 1950s."
There are also plenty of playlists crafted by in-house editors who helped create categories based on music genre, occasion ("dinner party"), tempo ("upbeat jazz") and even mood ("happy music.")
Most interesting for those who can't remember the name of a tune, it can search for a song based on a few words from the lyrics.
And for a listener who doesn't know what to play, it will find something, based on his or her past preferences, a trick straight out of Amazon's long experience with predicting customers' purchases.
These advances in verbal search could help counteract one of the more distinctive attributes of Google Home, a rival to the Echo that relies on Google's expertise in search to find exactly what users are looking for, even if they're not too sure about it. (Verbal commands won't be available in smartphones or in the personal-computer version of the service at this point, however.)
Ryan Redington, director of Amazon Music, said in an interview that listening to music at home is a main activity for users of Echo.
The device promises to drive a second wave of adoption of music-streaming services, he said. The first wave, prompted by smartphones and other mobile devices, drove huge growth for Spotify, Pandora and the like.
That's also the point of the $4 monthly Echo single-device subscription: to promote the adoption of music streaming among new listeners, Redington said.
Amazon isn't discontinuing the bare-bones Amazon Prime Music, available at no additional cost to Prime members but with a much more limited catalog.
The Music Unlimited service will also be available on iOS, Android, the web, PC and Mac, as well as Fire devices.
