Prime Music vs. Amazon Music Unlimited

Amazon Music is the third most popular music streaming service that offers millions of songs, playlists, and stations for music lovers to stream online and download for offline playback. You can stream the music on this platform with a Prime Music account and Amazon Music Unlimited. Sometimes, it is difficult for someone to decide which is better for them because they have an unclear distinction between the two parts. Here we will make a comparison between Prime Music and Amazon Music Unlimited and hope it could help you make the right choice. Now here we go:

Prime Music is available to Amazon Prime members at no extra cost. People can directly listen to music on Amazon Prime Music with your Amazon Prime membership ($14.99 per month or $139 per year). Amazon Music Unlimited costs an extra $9.99 monthly for Prime Music users or $99 yearly for an annual subscription.

Without Prime, you'll spend $10.99 per month for Music Unlimited, though if you only want to use Music Unlimited on an Echo, Echo Dot, or Tap speaker, that costs just $4.99 per month. If you're going to get an Amazon Music Unlimited Family Plan, it costs $16.99 per month or $169 per year.

By the way, two plans have streaming limits. If you are a Prime Music user, you can only stream songs online on one device at a time. The same is true for users of the Amazon Music Unlimited individual plan; if you want to use it on multiple devices, you can upgrade to an Amazon Music Unlimited Family plan. Up to six devices can be used simultaneously.

Until November 2022, Prime Music has over 2 million songs that you can stream without any ads and millions of playlists created by Amazon Music Experts and personalized streaming stations. Since then, Amazon has officially announced major changes to Prime Music. The accessible catalog for Prime members has expanded directly from the previous 2 million tracks to 100 million tracks, the same number that users of Amazon Music Unlimited can get.

Not only that, but for some Prime subscribers who love podcasts, the change has other benefits, such as the ability to listen to ad-free podcasts on demand. Prime subscribers will have access to shows from CNN, NPR, ESPN, and The New York Times; the Wondery Premium Podcast Catalog; new Amazon exclusives and collections.

Although the number of songs that Prime users can access has increased dramatically. But they can only access the full music catalog in shuffle mode. Simply put, Prime Music users can only play songs from All-Access playlists on demand and offline. This seemingly very good move limits the power of users to choose songs freely. This means that users have to skip a lot of tracks every time to find the track they need. And Amazon Music has a limited number of "skips". If you want unlimited skips, you have to pay to upgrade to the unlimited version of Amazon Music.

Amazon Music Prime members with the changes have some restrictions on playing Amazon Music. For example, All-Access Playlists requested on Echo devices can only be played in shuffle mode.

Amazon Prime Music provides music with a bitrate of up to 320kbps on the Amazon Music app. However, Amazon unveiled a lossless audio streaming plan, which is a high-quality plan available as an add-on subscription with Amazon Music Unlimited Individual and Family Plans. So users who subscribe to Amazon Music Unlimited can stream more than 100 million songs in High Definition (HD, 44.1KHz sample rate) and millions of songs in Ultra High Definition (Ultra HD, up to 192 kHz).

HD Audio and Ultra HD Audio are only available to Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers as part of its Amazon Music HD tier. Therefore, if you are a person who is extremely pursuing music quality and has a high requirement for audio quality, Amazon Music Unlimited is more suitable for you.

Similarly, Prime Music and Amazon Music Unlimited are supported on all Amazon Music-supported devices. You can stream music with Amazon Music app for PC and Mac (Note: HD and Ultra HD playback is not supported on the Web Player.), and the app for phones and tablets with iOS and Android systems, and of cause, all supported Echo devices, Fire TV and tablet, web player, and so on. However, Prime Music can only be streamed on one device at a time. For Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers, it depends on the plans. People who subscribe to Individual Plan or Single-Device Plan, the same as the Prime user, can stream on one device at a time only. The Family Plan users can stream on up to six devices at a time.

In addition, the use of Prime Music users on some devices is subject to certain restrictions, as follows:

1. All-Access Playlists requested on Echo devices play in shuffle mode.
2. Only music is available on Fire TV. There are no podcasts to be found.
3. A full music library and ad-free podcasts are not available for Fire Tablet.

As can be seen from the above, the use of Prime Music on some devices is still relatively limited, and Unlimited has a greater advantage in this regard. Of course, if you are already a Prime member, these restrictions are negligible for you. Because you can get Prime Music services without paying extra.

Based on some of the commonalities and differences between Prime Music and Amazon Music Unlimited mentioned above. It is not difficult to see that after a significant change, Prime Music has many unacceptable restrictions. For example, many songs on the playlist cannot be played in sequence, nor can they be downloaded offline. Secondly, although the devices supported by Prime Music are no different from Unlimited, the range, types, and forms that can be played are limited.

In terms of price, Prime users used to spend 7.99 dollars a month to get Unlimited rights, and now they need 8.99 dollars. Unlimited's home account has also increased the price. We have to admit that Unlimited can provide users with a better and more comprehensive music experience, so upgrading to Unlimited is also a good choice. But the choice is in the hands of the user, and you can also consider other streaming music service platforms if necessary.

If you don't want to upgrade your account, but want to get rid of these annoying shackles, such as only shuffling music, being unable to download music, being limited by the number of devices, etc. Then I think the best way is to use a powerful and effective third-party tool to download your favorite Amazon music locally. The specific steps will be shown in the next section.

Both Prime Music and Amazon Music Unlimited support downloading music to the supported devices for offline playback. However, you should have noticed that all the downloads from Prime Music or Amazon Music Unlimited cannot be moved to the devices with which the apps are incompatible. Besides, the downloads will be inaccessible once your subscription is canceled. To prevent this situation, we suggest that you download tracks from Prime Music and Amazon Music Unlimited with TunePat Amazon Music Converter and keep them forever.

TunePat Amazon Music Converter supports converting songs from Prime Music & Amazon Music Unlimited to MP3, AAC, WAV, FLAC, AIFF, or ALAC format and keeps lossless audio quality after converting. In addition, this program can save the basic meta information of the music and enables you to transfer the downloaded music to any media device. TunePat has a user-friendly interface and you can download music easily. Below is how it works.