Amazon Music opens up Alexa and streaming stats to artists
Amazon is finally launching an app to help musicians better understand how their music is performing on its music streaming service. It’s available starting today on iOS and Android, and through a companion website.
Amazon Music for Artists has the type of features you would expect from an app of this type. Musicians can use it to see how many people are listening to their songs, as well as where their biggest fans live. It also allows artists to see how many people have asked Alexa to play their music, with the data broken by album, song and lyric. At launch, artists who have distributed their music through CD Baby can get expedited verification.
Amazon is late to the party when it comes to giving musicians an app built for their specific needs. Spotify and Apple Music have offered artist apps since 2017 and 2018, respectively. It’s also trying to catch up in terms of subscribers. As of April 2019, Amazon Music had 32 million subscribers across its music services, putting it behind both Spotify and Apple Music. The two announced last year they had 100 million and 60 million paying users respectively. What it does have going for it is that it’s been picking up subscribers faster than Spotify, growing at a rate of about 70 percent between 2018 and 2019. Making its platform more amenable to artists is one way to continue that type of growth.
Correction 3/14 7:57AM ET: A previous version of this article mistakenly said only artists who have worked with CD Baby could get their accounts verified.
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