Amazon Music HD drops lossless audio to $9.99 amid Apple Music competition

News
By
published
Amazon Music on iPhone
Amazon Music on iPhone (Image credit: iMore)

What you need to know

  • Amazon Music HD is now available for just $9.99 per month.
  • That gives users access to lossless audio with a saving of $5.
  • Apple just announced its own lossless audio at the same $9.99 price.

Amazon Music, Amazon's lossless music streaming tier, is now available for just $9.99 – a reduction from the previous price of $15.99. The move comes on the same day Apple Music added its own lossless audio support at the same $9.99 price point.

Reported by Deadline, it appears that Amazon Music managed to get its news out mere minutes before Apple made its own announcement.

Amazon's high-fidelity streaming service, Amazon Music HD, is now available to Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers at no extra cost, the company tells Billboard. Amazon Music HD previously cost $14.99 a month ($12.99 for Prime members) while Amazon Music Unlimited, its most popular service option, is $9.99 a month ($7.99 for Prime members).

Apple's new lossless service will also come with support for Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos at the same $9.99 price point that its previous lossy service came at.

Amazon says that it always wanted to be able to offer Amazon Music HD at this price point, making it more mass-market in the process.

"It's something we've all we've been wanting to do for a long time," says Amazon Music vp Steve Boom. "When we launched, we already broke the mold by taking a service that had been $19.99 -- and really just for the audiophile at that price point -- and brought it down to something that was much more mass-market at $14.99."

Maybe I'm old and cynical – I am – but I struggle to believe Amazon was planning this before it got wind of Apple Music's plans.

No matter which streaming service you're using now might be a good time to check out the best AirPods Max deals we could find. You know, just to have a look.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.