Amazon could be preparing to set itself apart from rivals like Spotify and Apple in the music space. It looks as though Amazon’s next move to better compete in the online music marketplace is a new, high-resolution streaming service. Music Business Worldwide has come forward with a report claiming that the technology company and online marketplace is currently preparing to debut a high-definition music streaming service as well. It is expected to arrive in 2019 and the service will b existing alongside Amazon’s other streaming offerings and should cost somewhere around $15 a month.
“It’s a better bit rate, better than CD quality,” an unnamed source told MWB. “Amazon is working on it as we speak: they’re currently scoping out how many catalogs they can get from everyone and how they’ll ingest it.”
The best known existing high-resolution streaming service offering comes from TIDAL, whose TIDAL Hi-FI subscription tier costs $19.99 per month and offers CD-quality lossless streams at 44.1 kHz / 16 bit.
In addition, TIDAL also offers a ‘Masters’ quality offering for pickier audiophiles, which presents thousands of albums at 96 kHz / 24 bit.
Meanwhile, Deezer offers a HiFi tier at a standard price of $19.99 per month, which, like TIDAL’s equivalent, streams music at 44.1 kHz / 16-bit via FLAC files.
AmazAs we can see it’s clear what exactly Amazon’s strategy is here. With this service’s release, the company will have a tier in every price range, competing with Spotify’s free and premium tiers as well as other Hi-Fi services. However, it will be quite interesting to see whether Amazon’s bet pays out, if this rumor of a higher-end tier is accurate and whether this is, in fact, a smarter way for streaming services to operate.