Amazon Reacts To Apple’s Announcement and Confirms Music HD For All at No Extra Cost

Subscribers to Amazon Music Unlimited can now upgrade to the highest quality streaming audio available, for free. Reacting to the fact that Apple Music announced it will offer lossless audio streaming as standard starting in June, Amazon also announced that Amazon Music HD Lossless Audio, previously available at an additional cost, is now standard for Unlimited Tier subscribers.

Amazon Music announced a partnership with Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group to remaster thousands of songs and albums to be streamed in its Ultra High Definition premium tier music service, upgrading the digital streaming audio quality of these songs to the highest available. Music from Eagles, Marvin Gaye, Nirvana, Tom Petty, Diana Ross, Linkin Park, J. Cole, Waylon Jennings, Ramones, 2 Chainz, Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez and more, is now available in exclusive remasters on Amazon Music HD.

On Tuesday, October 15, in New York, Sony, together with four music streaming services and an important number of music industry partners promoted a press event to announce the new 360 Reality Audio music ecosystem. This follows the presentations made early at CES 2019 and a repeat of the demonstrations at IFA 2019 in Berlin. At this event, Sony announced the upcoming commercial availability of 360 Reality Audio, an immersive audio experience utilizing object-based spatial audio technology.

During a special event promoted to announce a new generation of Amazon Alexa products, technologies and solutions, Amazon introduced an all-new line-up of Echo devices to expand its Alexa voice assistant ecosystem in the home and now also on-the-go. The all-new Echo Buds, using ANC technology licensed from Bose, join the Echo Auto as another option to take Alexa outside the home. The new Echo speakers also include the Echo Studio, engineered in collaboration with Dolby and supporting HRA and immersive audio reproduction.

Amazon announced the launch of Amazon Music HD, a new tier of "higher quality" lossless streaming, promising "more than 50 million songs in High Definition," and "millions of songs in Ultra High Definition," a designation akin to TV services that Amazon thinks consumers will understand better than High Resolution Audio (HRA). The first tier of the service "High Definition" is in fact a CD-quality FLAC lossless streaming, while the "Ultra HD" tier defines FLAC streaming of 24-bit and a sample rate up to 192 kHz, or HRA.