, Columnist
Amazon, the Music Prodigy
The streaming service is off to a super start, but the big question is its ultimate aim.
This article is for subscribers only.
We know Amazon.com Inc. has become a virtual mega-mall for shopping, a creator of gadgets for our daily commutes and our homes and a mover-and-shaker in entertainment. Less well known is how quickly the online retailer has become a force in digital music.
A little over a year after Amazon started to offer people access to web-streaming songs for a monthly fee, the company is the world's third-largest digital music service by subscribers behind Spotify and Apple Music, according to Midia Research's Mark Mulligan, a music industry analyst. He also estimates that weekly listening on Amazon's music service is second-highest among the paid music services, behind Spotify and ahead of Apple Music.