Amazon Music Unlimited has launched in Europe (AMZN)

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Amazon’s on-demand music streaming service, Amazon Music Unlimited, has launched in the UK, Germany, and Austria, TechCrunch reports.

The debut comes with a redesign of Amazon’s mobile music app, and more impressive integrations with Echo and Alexa.

Amazon Music Unlimited is the company’s main on-demand music streaming offering. It has a catalog of 40 million tracks, as opposed to Prime Music’s more limited 2-million-song library. Music Unlimited is available for £7.99-a-month ($10-a-month) or £79-a-year for Prime members, and £9.99-a-month for non-Prime members. There’s also a bargain £3.99-a-month option that limits the service to Amazon Echo, the company’s voice-controlled speaker.

Here is a primer on Amazon’s approach to the music streaming space:

• Voice is the main differentiator for Amazon Music Unlimited. Curated playlists, offline listening, and exclusive artist offerings are becoming standard features across music-streaming services. Amazon will offer all of these, but is banking its digital voice assistant Alexa as a key differentiator. Alexa will be able to play music based on moods, genres, original release dates, and other queries by tapping into a song’s metadata.
• The home will usher in the second phase of music streaming. Mobile helped drive the first growth of music streaming subscriptions, and Amazon believes that peoples' homes will be instrumental in ushering in a second wave. In particular, Amazon sees voice interfaces as the future of music listening in the home, and probably the car too, according to a Musically interview with Amazon’s Paul Firth. All of this plays into Amazon's plans to place the Echo at the center of the smart home. 

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