Updated, November 14: Amazon launched its new Music Unlimited service in the UK on Monday morning.

Subscribers to its Prime service will apparently have access to "40 million songs, thousands of hand-curated playlists, and personalised stations" for an additional price of £7.99/month or £79/year (which comes to £6.58/month). Users without subscriptions will be able to sign up to the tune of £9.99 per month.

British customers will note that the price in dollars is the same as the price in pounds—at $7.99 per month.

Owners of an Amazon Echo or Echo Dot device will have access to a separate, cheaper deal that starts at £3.99/month—again the same price in pounds as dollars—if they want to use their subscription on a single device.

Amazon Music Unlimited remains a separate offering to Amazon Prime Music, which gives subscribers access to a catalogue of around two million songs to stream at no extra cost.

Original story

Amazon has launched an aggressively priced music streaming service to take on Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, and others in what is now a crowded market.

Subscribers to Amazon Music Unlimited—which promises access to a library of "tens of millions" of songs—will be able to control it vocally via the online retail giant's voice service, Alexa.

Subscriptions in the US start at $3.99 (£3.26) per month for users who own an Amazon Echo device (the Amazon Echo sells for £150, and the Echo Dot for £50; however, the Tap isn't yet available in the UK.)

The price tag for the music streaming service jumps to $7.99 (£6.52) per month for Amazon Prime customers, who can access the service through any device. Anyone else interested in signing up to Amazon Music Unlimited will have to shell out $9.99 (£8.15) per month, the company said. It's expected to launch in the UK later this year, but Amazon is yet to reveal an exact date or prices for British customers.

Amazon is going heavy on the voice-control aspect; users can ask the service's app to play an artist's music, and it'll put together a playlist of the most popular songs—or a band's latest track can apparently be requested without the subscriber having to name it first.

Alexa will learn a subscriber's tastes, Amazon claimed, and it's offering what appears to be a Shazam-like service, where listeners can ask it to identify songs from lyrics they remember.

Mood music based on a user's listening history will also be selected by Alexa, we're told, so a request for "happy music" will result in a playlist based on the genres it knows a subscriber likes. Similarly, it can understand commands like "music for a dinner party" and can access lists such as "Dinner With Friends," "Cooking With '90s Hip-Hop," or "Indie Dinner Party," presumably without calling the taste police on you.

Amazon Music's director, Kintan Brahmbhatt, told Reuters that "you can ask for Michael Jackson by saying, 'Play music by the King of Pop;' [and] it's smart enough to know that's what you meant."

This is Amazon's second foray into the world of streaming music after it launched Amazon Prime Music a couple of years ago, with a catalogue of two million or so songs as an extra for people subscribing to its Prime service. Prime Music isn't dying, exactly, but Prime subscribers will have to fork out a few extra quid per month to upgrade their subscription.

And while Amazon's pricing structure might compete with Spotify's or Apple Music's, its library might not. The company isn't being more specific than "tens of millions," but its two biggest rivals can boast a guaranteed 30 million or more each of songs.

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