Photo Credit: Waldermar Brandt
Amazon Music is focusing on a new ad campaign for HD music – but will it make a difference?
Amazon’s music strategy is all over the place compared to Apple Music and Spotify. There are several different Amazon Music tiers, most revolving around whether you’re a Prime member or not. But one place Amazon’s offering differs from both Apple Music and Spotify is HD music.
Amazon Music HD debuted September 2019 with a catalog of over 50 million HD songs. Since its launch, Amazon’s HD catalog has grown – alongside its subscriber numbers.
In April of 2019, Amazon reported around 32 million music subscribers as a whole. In January 2020, Amazon reported that those numbers had grown to around 55 million subscribers.
It’s impossible to tell how much the Amazon HD Music offering helped to boost this number, since Amazon doesn’t break down its tier numbers. Counterpoint Research published a report earlier this year estimating Amazon saw 104% year-on-year growth.
Amazon’s latest HD music ad campaign may help further boost subscribers to that tier of its service.
Amazon Music’s new “Life in HD” global advertising campaign seeks to highlight what it ‘feels like’ to listen to HD music. To that goal, the campaign debuts a new single, “Mm Mm Good” by Bounce music pioneer Big Freedia. The campaign will feature different songs according to the country in which it debuts.
Here’s a quick peek at the tracklist for each country where the campaign is running.
- Pop Smoke’s “Aim for the Moon” in the US
- Heddie One’s “Ain’t it Different” in the UK
- Perfume’s “Time Warp” in Japan
- Clueso’s “Flugmodus” in Germany
Amazon Music HD costs $14.99/monthly for non-Prime members or $12.99/monthly for Prime members. Amazon says it now has over 60 million songs in its HD catalog. It also has ‘millions’ of songs in Ultra HD and a growing catalog of 3D Audio tracks. Amazon Music HD also expanded its availability this year to France, Italy, Spain, and Canada.
If you’re unfamiliar with 3D audio, it’s a format that aims to re-create the feel of attending a concert. The spatial audio feel of these tracks is accomplished through multi-track mixing. In this realm, Sony’s 360 Reality Audio format is gaining the most traction among streaming services.
With Amazon’s push into making HD music mainstream and its growth, other major competitors may take the same approach. Both Spotify and Apple Music have experimented with offering HD music, but neither has committed. Spotify even dismissed Amazon’s adoption of HD music back in September of 2019.