Music Streaming Review: Amazon Music HD
Can Amazon Music HD Win the Hearts of Audiophiles?
Amazon brings lossless music to the masses
Verdict
Amazon Music HD brings hi resolution to the masses and it does a fine job at that. It is a solid step up for Amazon Music subscribers looking for better sound quality or an easy way for audiophiles to cut the monthly bill.
- Strengths: cheapest HiFi tier, search, Alexa, integrated download store
- Weaknesses: sound quality, user experience
Key information
- Cost: $12.99/month or $129/year for Prime members or $14.99/month for Amazon customers, first 90 days free
- Audio formats: lossless, FLAC at 16-Bit/44.1 kHz (CD quality), 24-Bit/44.1 kHz — 192 kHz
- Declared catalog size: 50 million tracks
- Platforms: mobile, desktop, Alexa-enabled devices, audio devices. See more information.
As recently as September 2019, Amazon blew up another market by offering access to 50 million tracks in high quality for only $12.99/month. This is Amazon, you probably trust them already for other online services and you may already be invested into the Alexa ecosystem.
User experience
In most fronts, Amazon Music HD occupies a space between premium plans and hifi tiers. The cost for Prime members sits in between those two worlds and so does audio quality.
In terms of experience, Amazon Muisc HD does not bring anything new to the table. The only way that HD sets itself apart from Unlimited is audio quality. Everything else remains exactly the same. Therefore, current Music Unlimited subscribers can only benefit from a step up in sound quality when switching to Music HD.
While Amazon is the best at optimizing conversion ratios, Spotify is more savvy about the listening experience and Apple is king at experience across the board. Premium subscribers coming from Apple Music, Spotify and even Deezer will get lossless music at the cost of functionality and an intangible quality that makes the listening experience more emotional on their apps than on Amazon’s.
Audiophiles coming from Tidal and Qobuz will find a better offer in economic terms, but they may also find that Amazon does not sound quite as good as its competitors. They may also find the Amazon experience to be cold and impersonal compared to Tidal’s heavy curation and the audiophile culture of Qobuz.
For those interested in a cruder description, the mobile app is divided in four sections: Home, Find, My Music and Alexa. The Home tab highlights features of the week, music you played recently and playlists. The Find tab features a search box at the top. It also shows your last searches and lets you browse stations, playlists, charts and new releases. The search, by the way, is quite powerful, with real time suggestions as you type, at the speed you would expect from Amazon.
My Music features all the content you have saved. If you buy music from Amazon, it will show here as well, even if you bought it years before subscribing. You can also find your favorite artists in this section and, contrary to other hifi plans, Amazon allows fans to follow their favorite artists and receive a notification when new music is available.
The last tab is Alexa, for voice commands. Alexa is a great feature if you own an Alexa-enabled device. If you don’t, it doesn’t add much value, since you still have to navigate to the Alexa tab to start a voice command. In that time, you can probably tap your way through the task you want to accomplish.
Music library
Amazon claims a catalog of 50 million songs*, only surpassed by Apple Music and Tidal.
I spent a lot of time searching albums on Amazon Music and its competitors to assess their catalogs. On the one hand, I wanted a benchmark that would be useful to most of my readers, so I searched the first 200 albums on Rolling Stone magazine list of “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”.
I also wanted to see how Amazon did at finding the music that I was searching for my personal use, so I noted down all my music searches for 3 weeks.
On the first test, Amazon performed just OK. It found 92% of the top 200 albums on the Rolling Stone’s list, but even such a high success rate lags behind the 93% achieved by Apple Music, Deezer, Pandora, Spotify and Tidal.
I was also able to find 85% of my personal searches. Of all the services I tested, only Spotify scored higher with a success rate of 86%.
Compared to the hifi players, Amazon was more successful than Tidal at finding the songs I searched for. Amazon was of course the only service where I found Garth Brooks’ albums, but also the only one with Don Shirley’s “Orpheus in the Underworld”. It also beat Tidal in finding Asia’s self-titled album and The Entrance Band’s self-titled album from 2009.
All in all, Amazon’s audio library is at par with Tidal’s, but does not offer video. In my book, Amazon’s library crushes Qobuz. While they scored the same 92% ratio when I searched the top 200 albums on the Rolling Stone’s list, Amazon’s 85% of my personal searches is high compared to the 77% achieved by Qobuz.
Audio formats and sound quality
Conversations about sound quality are often controversial, but I was not impressed by Amazon. Music HD sounds clearer than premium plans, but less convinving than other hifi plans. While Tidal and Qobuz at their best make it feel like the musicians are right in front of you, Amazon sounds more one-dimensional. Even Deezer achieves a fuller sound than Amazon.
Regarding audio formats, new service new terminology. In Amazon Music Unlimited, CD quality tracks are labeled as HD, with higher qualities labeled as “Ultra HD”. Like Deezer HiFi and Tidal HiFi, it comes with 3D audio as well, specifically, “over a thousand 3D tracks, mastered in Dolby Atmos and Sony’s 360 Reality Audio”.
Devices and integrations
Naturally, Amazon Music HD is widely supported by Amazon devices, like the Echo, Fire TV and Fire Tablet, plus the Echo Studio, Echo Link, and Echo Amp support Ultra HD quality audio. Find the complete list of supported devices.
Economics
Amazon’s key differentiator is price. Their subscription plan of $12.99/month or $129/year for Prime members is unbeatable. That is 35% cheaper than Tidal HiFi!
Their price for other Amazon customers is $14.99/month, which still beats Tidal, but is equal to Deezer HiFi. Pressured by the launch of Music HD, Qobuz lowered it monthly subscription to $14.99 in the US as well.
As Medium writer Alex Rowe concludes in his review, “The pressure is now on Apple and Spotify to launch true lossless services, and that pressure is immense”.
Footnotes
- Amazon (2020). Unlimited access to 50 million songs. Available at https://www.amazon.com/music/unlimited [Accessed 2020/01/25]