Amazon is overhauling its music offering in India, ending one of the longstanding benefits of its Prime membership and introducing a standalone subscription tier for listeners who want an uninterrupted music experience.
From July 2, Prime members will no longer receive ad-free music streaming or offline downloads as part of their subscription. Those features will instead move to a new paid tier, Amazon Music Unlimited, marking a significant shift in the company’s music strategy in one of the world’s largest streaming markets.
The move effectively splits Amazon’s music service into multiple tiers. Prime members and non-Prime users will continue to have access to music through an ad-supported experience, while listeners looking for ad-free playback, downloads, HD and Ultra HD audio, and Spatial Audio will need to subscribe to Amazon Music Unlimited.
According to reports, the new service will be priced at ₹99 per month for Prime members and ₹119 per month for non-Prime users.
Amazon confirmed the changes in a statement to Android Authority.
For years, music has been positioned as an added benefit within the broader Amazon Prime ecosystem rather than a standalone subscription product. The latest changes suggest the company is placing greater emphasis on direct monetisation of its music audience, following a playbook already adopted by several competing streaming platforms.
The introduction of an ad-supported listening tier also brings Amazon Music closer to the models used by services such as Spotify and Deezer, where free listening serves as a funnel for paid subscriptions.
For the wider music industry, the development presents a familiar trade-off.
A free, advertising-supported tier can expand reach and potentially introduce more listeners to artists and catalogues available on the platform. However, ad-supported streams typically generate lower payouts than streams from paying subscribers, meaning growth in listening does not necessarily translate into proportional revenue growth.
For rights holders and artists, the change reinforces an ongoing reality of the streaming business: audience scale remains important, but so does the mix of listeners generating that consumption.
The announcement also arrives at a time when streaming services globally are under increasing pressure to improve revenue per user. Over the past few years, platforms have experimented with price increases, premium feature bundles and new subscription formats as competition intensifies and growth in mature markets slows.
While Amazon has so far limited the changes to India, industry observers will be watching closely to see whether similar adjustments appear in other territories. Reports have already suggested that some users in Australia have received notifications related to comparable changes.
For now, the update marks one of the most significant revisions to Amazon Music’s proposition in India since the service launched, signalling a stronger separation between free, bundled and premium music experiences.
