Shortly after Apple announced that it was going to make lossless audio available to all Apple Music subscribers, Amazon has done the same.
These are two significant moves by two huge companies in the streaming space and will likely cause a pretty big dent in Tidal and Deezer’s subscriber growth.
Amazon’s HD music tier was previously priced at $13 per month for Prime subscribers and $15 per month for everyone else. Now, It’s priced at $10 per month, making it a much better deal than Tidal ($20 per month for Hi-Fi) and Spotify, which currently doesn’t even have an HQ music option, but will soon.
Realistically, the only other service that could offer this would be Youtube Music since, like Amazon Music and Apple Music, it has a large company backing it, so it doesn’t need to try as hard as Spotify and Tidal to be profitable.
Over 70 million songs on Amazon Music can now be streamed in ‘HD,’ which is 16 bits and a sample rate of 44.1kHz (CD quality). The company also has seven million songs in ‘Ultra HD,’ which is 24 bits and a sample rate up to 192 kHz.
Beyond that, the company is also giving all users access to its catalogue of 3D mixed music that allows people to listen to music in a new way. Apple also added this feature to Apple Music today, and it’s being heralded as the successor to stereo sound since it can push audio at the user, especially when they’re using headphones or a surround sound system, from many directions instead of just two.
Source: Amazon Music
