Skip to main content

Androidians land some cool new features for Amazon Prime Music

amazon music unlimited prime day deal
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Amazon is slowly but surely trying to make its Amazon Prime Music streaming service more relevant in the cutthroat streaming landscape. Today the company announced some handy feature upgrades for Android users that should make the diminutive service more appealing.

First and foremost on the list is the added ability to download or save music for offline listening to an SD card on an Android mobile device. Amazon claims the feature is something users have been clamoring for, and it does seem like a handy way to let Androidians load up on tracks like crazy, while preserving crucial space on a phone’s internal hard drive.

Recommended Videos

Today’s upgrade brings other features on board, as well, including new artist detail pages designed as a “one-stop destination” for an artist’s most popular songs, albums, photos, streaming stations, and more. The app is also now supported on Android wear devices, allowing users to browse for tunes and control playback from an Android watch, or other Wear device.

Amazon is also trying to make it easier to find the latest tunes on Prime, offering a “New to Prime” tab so you can see which new tracks have come online recently, as well as a “Popular” tab to easily seek out chart-topping tracks, albums, and even playlists.

Offered as a sort of musical tip along with your $100 annual Prime membership, Amazon’s music service has thus far been more of an “also ran” offering behind more prominent on-demand streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and to a lesser extent, Deezer and Rdio. However, both Amazon and Google (which hosts Google Play Music) are steadily hoping to increase the viability of their music streamers as the digital marketplace continues to move from a download-first paradigm to the convenient world of streaming.

Amazon has had good success so far bolstering its Prime video streaming service (also free to Prime members), building up its vault of original series with some real success, even besting Netflix this year in the Emmy race. If the ecommerce giant can do the same with its music service, all the better. An Amazon Prime Music service with some real teeth would add some much-needed competition in the burgeoning streaming landscape. And healthy competition, from any angle, is always good for consumers.

Ryan Waniata
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Ryan Waniata is a multi-year veteran of the digital media industry, a lover of all things tech, audio, and TV, and a…
The Amazon app on your phone just got a cool AI feature
Rufus AI chatbot in Amazon app.

Last year, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that every business division at the company was experimenting with AI. Today, Amazon has announced its most ambitious AI product yet: a chatbot named Rufus to assist with your online shopping.
Imagine ChatGPT, but one that knows every detail about all the products in Amazon’s vast catalog. Plus, it is also connected to the web, which means it can pull information from the internet to answer your questions. For example, if you plan to buy a microSD card, Rufus can tell you which speed class is the best for your photography needs.
Amazon says you can type all your questions in the search box, and Rufus will handle the rest. The generative AI chatbot is trained on “product catalog, customer reviews, community Q&As, and information from across the web.”
In a nutshell, Amazon wants to decouple the hassle of looking up articles on the web before you make up your mind and then arrive on Amazon to put an item in your cart. Another benefit of Rufus is that instead of reading through a product page for a certain tiny detail, you can ask the question directly and get the appropriate responses.

An AI nudge to informed shopping

Read more
SiriusXM reboots satellite radio with new app, features — and price
An unreleased version of the new SiriusXM app on a Cadillac Lyric EV.

SiriusXM is simultaneously a legacy brand and one that's looking toward the future of satellite radio in a streaming world. And today at a celebrity-laden event in New York City — kicked off by none other than Howard Stern — SiriusXM took a more-than 90-minute look at its history, its present, and where it's going in 2024 and beyond.

Satellite radio was perhaps a bit ahead of its time, allowing subscribers — yes, subscription radio — to listen to music, sports, and talk radio, anywhere in the country. It (brilliantly) worked deals with automakers to work its way into new cars with free trials. And it did so in the space between the advent of the modern smartphone and the introduction of proper streaming media services like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music. Today, SiriusXM boasts somewhere in the neighborhood of nearly 34 million subscribers.

Read more
YouTube rolling out some three-dozen new features this fall
The Digital Trends YouTube channel as seen on an iPhone and on a TV in the background.

The tweaks keep coming to the world's largest video provide. Today YouTube is taking the wraps off some three-dozen (more or less) new features. It's a cross-platform announcement, with the goods hitting phones and tablets, as well as televisions and wherever else you do your YouTube viewing.

Here's what you have to look forward to:

Read more