Back over the summer, Amazon launched its Prime Music offering in the UK. Anybody who pays Amazon £79 a year, for it’s free next day delivery service, and video streaming service, now also has access to more than a million tracks and hundreds of playlists to stream via the web, Fire TV or a mobile app. I’ve been using it on and off since it launched and thought it was worth writing about.

“A million songs you say? That’s a bit rubbish compared to the 30 million that others like Spotify and Apple Music offer?”

Well it is, and it isn’t.

But I don’t think this is really competing with those services. If you are subscribing to one of them you’re paying three times what the UK average consumer is used to paying for music on that subscription alone.

When it launched, it was noticeable that music from Universal was notably missing. But Amazon has subsequently done the deal and added some of their catalogue to its Prime Music offering.

In any case, this isn’t a full service as Spotify and Apple would offer. It’s an “enough” service. You’re already paying for it if you have Amazon Prime, so it’s just a free bolt on to you as a user.

If you need some more convincing, look back at my piece explaining how the average UK consumer spends less than £40 a year on music. Spotify Premium or Apple Music are not mass market offerings. Those companies might like them to be, but in fact they mostly appeal to a subset of the universe of people who listen to music.

I’ve been intrigued to see how Amazon’s offering is developing. Two weeks ago, the new Adele album, 25, was released to fanfair of publicity and primetime TV exposure. Notably, the album is not available to stream on either Apple or Spotify’s streaming subscription services. On the other hand, another album that will likely be a big seller ahead of Christmas is Enya’s new album, Dark Sky Island. That album is available to stream on Spotify, but perhaps more interestingly, Amazon.

For the most part, Amazon’s one million tracks are slightly older fare – albums mostly having been out a year before they reach Prime streaming. There are a few other newer albums on the service too like new ones from “Jeff Lynne’s ELO” and, er, One Direction.

And then there’s this week’s big new release, A Headful of Dreams by Coldplay. That too can be streamed on Amazon. It’s also seemingly on Apple Music, but is not available to stream on Spotify (possibly because Spotify won’t offer different catalogues to premium and free users). [Update: Seemingly, Coldplay’s new album will be available on Spotify from this Friday, 11th December]

Amazon is making quite a big deal about all four, so I imagine that there’s some kind of marketing quid pro quo going on.

[A little side note here on Adele.

Some have suggested that Adele is just being greedy not making her album available on Spotify et al. She has in past spoken pretty naively about the amount of tax she pays, which doesn’t come across well when you’re a multi-millionaire. But I think she’s entirely within her rights to get people to buy her album for a tenner rather than stream it for tuppence. She is the minority of artists who have the clout to demand this, alongside the likes of Taylor Swift. Kudos to her if she can get her own way.

The other slightly daft comment I’ve heard is that this somehow forces people into “ye olde” ways of buying a CD and ripping it.

Er. No.

Yes, the CD is getting distributed in hundreds of stores, including places like Tesco Express where you wouldn’t ordinarily expect to see music, but it’ll also sell a bucket-load on Amazon, iTunes and Google Play, all of whom will let you instantly download or stream the album without you ever having to go near a shiny disc.

In any case, there are still an awful lot of people who listen to music, but don’t subscribe to a streaming music service, or even use a free one. And they buy Adele albums as her gargantuan sales show.]

Back to Amazon Music.

30 million tracks is a ridiculously large number. So is one million. That’s still a lot of music. In fact it’s a scary amount of music. That means that it’s interesting to see how much curation is coming into play with all the music services these days. Because unless you are a real “muso,” there’s nothing scarier than that empty flashing box at the top of the screen asking you what you’d like to listen to.

Most of us have no idea what to type, apart from a handful of very obvious artists.

So like Apple, Amazon has pre-populated dozens of playlists for you start with.

And when you consider that some popular radio stations play as few as 400 unique tracks across a month, you’ll understand that a million tracks is actually quite a lot of choice even when you dive down into your preferred genres of music.

My main criticism of the service so far is accessing the music. It is true that there are perfectly functional apps for iOS and Android, with the latter not requiring you to download it from Amazon’s own store rather than Google Play as the do with the Amazon Video app. They’re functional rather than wonderful, but you get offline downloads and it merges purchased tracks with Prime Music that you “add” to your library.

But curiously, if you use a Fire TV, you’re mostly limited to playlists. I’ve yet to discover a good way to navigate around their offering, looking for individual albums within the Fire TV interface. If it’s there, it’s not intuitive.

The one thing I can’t try is listening via the Amazon Echo. Having recently had a chance to play with one a little, I’d actually love to buy one of these devices. But Amazon has yet to deign to release them outside of the US for reasons that aren’t really clear, since just about all the rest of the hardware, even their ill-fated phone, made it to the UK.

For me, the most useful aspect of Prime Music remains the automatic digital copies Amazon has of at least some of the CDs I’ve bought from it over the years. It’s not complete – indeed today, there are still plenty of new CDs that don’t come with Amazon’s AutoRip. But it at least gives me an immediate subset of my audio catalogue which can be supplemented with the Prime offering.

In the end, is this as good as the other streaming services? No, of course not. It was never designed to be. But if your household is already paying for Amazon Prime, then I can imagine a lot of people very happy to dip into Prime Music now and again.