The Prime Music version is extremely limited in terms of what music is available, not really worth considering in comparison to other offerings out there. Unlimited is better, but I still found myself coming up empty on searches quite often. Partially that's due to the fact that I tend to look for some pretty obscure stuff, weird metal and the like. But there were also some strange holes where parts of an artist's catalog is missing. The same happens on Spotify, too, but it seems to me that there are fewer gaps there.
Basic music streaming features are all present and accounted for. Playlists, saving your favorite artists and albums, apps on just about every platform, offline downloads in the mobile apps, and so on. I didn't have any trouble with any of the basics.
Where Amazon Music Unlimited differs most from Spotify is in the details, the little things that go beyond simply playing your favorite playlist. Examples:
- When you close the Amazon Music app (on PC or mobile) and then re-open it, it remembers what playlist/album you were on, but not which song. So it always restarts from the beginning. Spotify remembers the song position.
- There's no feature to suggest songs to add to playlists (or at least it's not obvious).
- Similarly, there's no "Playlist radio" feature with suggestions based on a playlist.
- Searching for a specific band or song name sometimes won't bring it up. Try "Bride" for instance...there's lots of stuff with Bride in the name, but the actual band "Bride" isn't listed in the results. You have to search for something like "Bride Troubled Times" (that's one of their signature songs) to find it.
- When using the phone app in the car with Android Auto, there are very limited options. If I want to find a playlist that I haven't listened to recently, I have to leave the auto app.
- Daily or weekly suggestion lists are a great feature that I can easily find in Spotify but not here.
- Song volume isn't normalized. Often songs in the same playlist will be significantly softer or louder than the others.
- You can share playlists with non-Unlimited members via web links, but they won't be able to listen to most of the songs without subscribing to Unlimited. By comparison, Spotify does let people listen even if they're not subscribers to Spotify Premium (but with ads).
Amazon is making a good effort to match up with Spotify in the streaming music arena, and it mostly does the job. But it's definitely not as mature yet, and in my opinion has quite a bit of work left to do. Even with the slightly higher price point (assuming you have Prime), I think Spotify is still the better choice for now.
