Jose GonzalezAmazon Music is one of several streaming services available to music fans. The streaming app fans choose can depend on where they live, their favorite music genres, their hardware or internet provider of choice, and other factors.
According to a Nielsen study, 57% of millennials in the United States use at least two different music apps. That’s why it’s important for you as an artist to get on multiple platforms. Today, let’s turn our attention to Amazon Music and how you can optimize it for better performance.
Amazon Music by the Numbers
According to Exploding Topics, Amazon Music was the number 4 streaming platform across the world in 2023 and number 3 in the United States. With 55 million users in the U.S. thanks in large part to the Amazon Prime service, and with Amazon Alexa (Amazon’s virtual assistant software) installed on a growing number of cars and other devices natively, the number of potential new customers is on the rise.
Here are a few more stats behind the use of Amazon Music:
- Amazon Music’s catalog now consists of over 100 million songs
- Amazon Music pays $0.00402 per stream compared to Spotify’s $0.003
- The Amazon Music app has been downloaded over 100 million times through the Google Play Store
Getting Your Music on Amazon Music
When it comes to setting up your artist profile on Amazon Music, your journey begins at artists.amazon.com. There, you can start an artist profile for yourself or an artist you manage.
Claim an artist profile as your own (or a client) and confirm your artist identity through one of your social media accounts. You should know within a few days if your request was approved.
The Basics of Amazon Music for Artists
The dashboard is your starting point and the insights you gain from it can help you better identify your listeners, their behaviors, and trends. You will be able to see your most downloaded songs, collections, the areas with higher streams of your music, fan engagement, and of course your revenue.
Image Source: https://artists.amazon.com/
One unique metric Amazon Music provides is separate Amazon Alexa voice requests. You now have insights into how often your music is requested by artist name, song name, album, etc., along with how often it may play as a result of a playlist request via Alexa.
Beyond just the metrics, you’ll find access to automated marketing tools to help you maximize visibility and engagement to grow your fan base. There is even a suite of collaboration tools to help you find and work with other artists, producers, and songwriters.
Additional Features Amazon Music
You’ve set up your account and uploaded some music. You are now discoverable but there are still some steps you can take and apps you can use to improve your discoverability and fan experience on Amazon Music.
Alexa Integration
You already know Amazon values the use of their assistants and it’s clear their customers are becoming more accustomed to using these devices on a daily basis. While the U.S. had 79 million users of voice assistants in 2017, that number reached 123 million by 2022.
If you’re going to be on Amazon Music, you must optimize for Alexa. Here is what Amazon recommends:
- Deliver your music to Amazon at least one week before release so Alexa has time to learn about it
- Make sure to fill in all your metadata — e.g., release date, version, explicit content flags, genre, etc.
- Beware special characters: Think of artists like “P!nk” or “!!!”
- Minimize last-minute changes that could undo Alexa’s initial learning efforts
Editorial Playlists
Amazon Music for Artists gives you the ability to submit your music to Amazon Music editors for inclusion in official Amazon Music playlists. Access the section from your dashboard and submit your song providing information about its genre and other characteristics. If your song is accepted, your inclusion in one of these playlists can lead to more streams of that song and more fans visiting your profile.
Community Playlists
As an artist, one step you can take is to create your own playlists. While you can and should include your music in these, you should also include music you like or music from other artists in your genre in an effort to embrace and be a part of your community. The favor may be returned but also, fans with similar tastes to yours will show their support.
Spotlight
This feature makes it possible for you to highlight one of your tracks, albums, or playlists for your listener base. Along with the post, you get to record a 3-minute message personalized for your audience to foster your unique community.
Add Intro
Similarly, if you’re getting ready to drop a new song, you can record a 15-second intro to that new release that fans can hear before enjoying the new song. Fans can find this introduction on your profile and via Alexa.
Twitch Integration
Twitch is a fantastic livestreaming platform. It may be most popular among gaming circles but musicians like T-Pain and Post Malone have found success, each with just under 1 million followers on the platform. Once connected, you can run a single livestream that goes to both platforms simultaneously.
Use Hype Deck for Striking Promotion
Hype Deck helps you create visuals that make your Amazon Music artist card and profile pop. You can then use the same brand visuals to create social media graphics and promote new music.
The basics behind using the hype cards are as follows:
- Use the song hype card to promote a song from previous album in advance of new release
- Use the album hype card to promote your new album upon release
- Promote one of your playlists
Of course, how you use them in combination with other Amazon Music promotional tools is up to you.
You’ll find Hype Deck from within your Amazon Music for Artists dashboard. The Amazon Music for Artists team put together a video dive into the feature that you should check out below.
Amazon Artist Merch Shop
LIke Alexa integration, the Amazon Artist Merch Shop relies on Amazon’s strengths as the largest online retailer today. It’s this retail reach and experience that enables you to create your own merch store page and link it to your Amazon Music for Artists profile.
When listeners navigate to your artist profile, they can go to your merch page seamlessly using their Amazon account and purchase any of your merchandise.
You can even tap into print-on-demand services through the merch shop so you can offer shirts and other merch without the need to carry and store inventory.
Getting the Most Out of Amazon Music
Amazon Music may not have the streaming numbers Spotify boasts about but with 55 million users and a variety of discoverability features, it’s a channel you should not ignore. Beyond basic setup, it pays to optimize Amazon Music to get the most you can from the Amazon infrastructure.
Alexa integration and optimization means your music will come up when fans make voice requests for your titles, name, lyrics, and genres. Merch pages powered by the Amazon store give your customers instant access to shirts, vinyl, and other merchandise with a voice command or click. Finally, Twitch integration makes livestreaming on Amazon simple and you don’t even have to decide between the two audiences since the same stream goes to both.
Exclusively on Amazon Music
One measure of a channel’s staying power and success is its partnerships. And Amazon Music’s partnerships illustrate the company’s position in the music space.
Garth Brooks
He’s one of the biggest names in country music. And boasting the title of “most diamond-certified albums” ahead of the Beatles, you could even argue Garth Brooks is one of the biggest names in music history. Brooks signed an exclusive deal with Amazon Music back in 2016.
Universal Music Group
While Universal (UMG) has recently been in the news for pulling their artists from platforms like TikTok, they have no such reservations with Amazon Music. UMG announced in 2022 that their collaboration with Amazon Music and Twitch was expanding, promising enhanced access to “live streams, high quality and spatial audio, artist merchandise, and exclusive experiences with UMG’s industry leading roster of artists from around the world.”
Stagecoach
The sold-out festival chose Amazon Music as the exclusive streaming platform for its weekend-long country music fest that took place in April. Country fans hopped onto Amazon Music to check out performances from Eric Church, Miranda Lambert, Morgan Wallen, and many more.
Final Words on Amazon Music
While Spotify is the most popular streaming application and YouTube gets the most attention for music videos, you have myriad options to share your music with music fans. Take this information with you and explore if Amazon Music is right for your music.
At Vortex Entertainment Group, we seek to facilitate an environment of diversity and inclusion, innovation, and transparency that drives the creation of unique immersive experiences and helps brands and platforms get the resources needed to best serve the entertainment community. Contact us today and set up an initial consultation to see how we can help you deliver a project you can be proud to call your own.
