Music lovers, your time is now

Introducing Amazon’s new lossless music streaming service, a new tier of its music service, dubbed Amazon Music HD. If you’re tired of paying $19.99 a month Tidal music, Amazon Music HD now charges $14.99 a month for the HD tier, or $12.99 if you’re an Amazon Prime customer. Even if you aren’t a member of the mega platform, it’s still cheaper than Tidal by $5. An extra $60 a year never hurt anyone.

What is it?

Amazon claims to have 50 million songs in “High Definition.” This is the term it’s applying to songs with CD-quality bit depth of 16 bits and a 44.1kHz sample rate. On top of that, it claims to have millions of songs in “Ultra HD” which translates to 24-bit with sample rates that range from 44.1kHz up to 192kHz. These files will be in a lossless FLAC format. FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, which is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software package that includes a codec implementation.

Amazon’s goal is for Amazon Music HD to become a widely used service. There are plenty of niches streaming services, and they don’t want to be one of them. Judging by the overwhelming number of people who use Amazon services for all sorts of things, it’s safe to say they will likely reach this goal. The platform hopes to stand out due to its HD quality of sound, something that competitors such as Spotify and Apple Music don’t advertise about themselves.

Thanks to the included subscription of Amazon Music with an Amazon Prime Membership, the number of subscribers is extremely high already. Thanks to the HD update to the service, the numbers are expected to rise in big ways. 

Neil Young Approved

Even rock ‘n roll legend Neil Young approves of Amazon Music HD. “This will be the biggest thing to happen in music since the introduction of digital audio 40 years ago.”

So, take it from Neil: Amazon Music HD is a must have.