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Ryan Redington
November 22, 2016
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With a BS in Industrial Engineering and a Minor in Business Administration, the University of Iowa graduate has overseen the launch of Amazon's two music streaming services, Prime Music in 2014 and the recent Amazon Music Unlimited, reporting to VP Steve Boom. A veteran at Jeff Bezos' groundbreaking online retailer, he started in the company's film video division seven-and-a-half years ago before joining music, where he worked on the physical retail side, then segued to digital and streaming. Redington's latest coup was spearheading Amazon's exclusive deal with Garth Brooks, bringing the Country superstar's catalog to the streaming world for the first time. Redington's secret weapon in the war against the current competition - including Spotify and Apple Music, both of whom have had a head start - is Echo, the voice-recognition hardware/speaker system where Alexa fulfills your every spoken musical request. Amazon is offering a $7.99 subscription to its $99-per-year Prime members (whose number is currently estimated at 63 million by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners) - who also have access for free to a two million-song library - and $3.99 for Echo owners. For non-Prime members, Amazon is competitive with the other streaming services at $9.99 a month, as well as a $14.99 family subscription plan.
You've had a pretty hectic couple of weeks launching Amazon Music Unlimited.
You work on something so hard for such a long period of time, then you get the chance to let people see it and get their feedback. I was in Nashville for the CMAs meeting with the Country labels, where we announced the exclusive deal with Garth Brooks, so it's been all positive.
How has the feedback been so far?
What's unique about the service is the voice component and the new innovations we've built around that. It's wild to hear people recite lyrics and have Alexa play the song. Or being able to play stuff by moods or eras. That's been the focus of much of the feedback, how cool and innovative a way it is to listen to music. The second piece of the rollout is updating our app design - the ease of finding content. We've had really great customer feedback.
The Internet economy has been known to accommodate only a single dominant player in each category. Is there room for more than one music streaming service or are you determined to eliminate the competition?
If you look at the industry as a whole, business is up 8% for the first six months of the year, and streaming is a major part of that growth, up 57% year-over-year. We've had Prime Music on the marketplace for a couple of years. Millions of people have been streaming from us, so we actually have a pretty large base to work from. And we've established a relationship with music consumers that goes back 20 years ... music was the second category at Amazon after books. We feel there's enough room for a number of players in this space. We feel the music market is going to really expand with voice in the home. That's where Echo comes in at $3.99, and if people want the service across all their devices, there's the $7.99 plan. We feel really good about our strategy. Music is going to be important at Amazon for a long, long time.
Are you banking on people wanting a more audiophile experience rather than computer speakers or earbuds?
Yes, we've announced an integration with Sonos, so our Echo Dot device integrates with high-fidelity speaker systems. When I put the Echo device in my kitchen, I listen to even more music because of the ease of use. It's a complicated back-end that makes things simple for the customer, and provides more engagement for the user. We just want them to have the best listening experience possible.
Will Alexa one day be able to identify a song by listening to just a passage, like Shazam?
It's still obviously very early days for us with Echo and music. You'll see a lot more innovation. The beauty of Alexa is she's always getting smarter. So we're taking all that feedback and learning how to build more sophisticated, better user experiences. At the start, the Echo search is more about lyrics than notes. We're trying to build a very natural interface as a way of talking about music with their friends and family. All you need to do is sing the lyrics or the hook stuck inside your head and Alexa will play the song back for you via a simple voice command, such as "Alexa, play the new Green Day song for me" or "Alexa, play the song that goes, 'I was doing just fine before I met you'," and you'll get The Chainsmokers' "Closer."
How important was pricing for Amazon Music Unlimited?
The price point for non-Prime members is competitive at $9.99, but we're also always looking to add value to the Prime membership. Prime Music has all the features of the premium service - you can download, unlimited skips, we have individual stations ... We feel we're offering value for $7.99, given the expanded catalog, from two million songs to tens of millions, which is growing by the day.
I like the fact you have a lyric component. How far away are you from adding album liner notes and videos?
Those are all great ideas and we're certainly aware of them through customer feedback. We're always trying to improve the service and please the customer. Another feature we're proud of is offline playback. We actually pre-cache some recommendations on your phone, so if you find yourself unable to connect, there's still music you can listen to.
Are you planning to incorporate social media features on the site to create an online community?
We're looking at all those options as we move forward, and as the product continues to evolve. Social is one area where we're certainly going to be involved. What's great about music right now is the landscape is changing so quickly. One of the things we do here every day is start with the customer and work backward, how to add value. All those ideas are on the table for us moving forward. Amazon, as a whole, represents a lot of great possibilities we'll continue to explore.
There's been a great deal of controversy over streaming exclusives, like the one you just did with Garth Brooks. Doesn't it hurt the artist by limiting his audience?
Our goal is to build a great product our customers will love. On the content side, we'll look at the opportunities as they come up. Garth Brooks happens to be the best-selling solo artist in the history of music in the U.S. The Country genre is an important one for us in terms of helping it grow streaming-wise. We're placing a stake in the ground; we'll see how these exclusives evolve, and move forward from there.
Are you watching what the competition in this space does?
We spend a lot more time focusing on our customers. Certainly, we pay attention to what's happening in the industry -- both those who are selling music in our space and those doing it through other avenues. Our primary focus right now is building a great product.
How do you feel about having a "free" tier?
What we really like about Prime Music is we have two million songs, a really great product and all the premium features. And it comes at no additional cost with Prime membership. That's our mainstream consumer product. For those who want to unlock more songs and a larger catalog, there's Amazon Music Unlimited.
Amazon has become a big player in creating its own movies and series. Is that a possible direction for music producing and distributing music by new (or even established) talent?
We have great relationships with the record labels and the distributors, whom we're licensing our content from. In the past, we've built custom playlists for the holidays; we worked with some independent artists producing some original material for a summer playlist.
Now that Amazon Music Unlimited is off the ground, what does a work day for you entail?
It's all about, how do we innovate? How do we build new features? How do we build a music service supported by voice? We want to nail that experience.
You should be selling a lot of Echos, like Apple once did its iPod and continues to do with its iPhone. You could call it an "Echo" system.
That's exactly right. We thought about how this device could be supported by music in a new way that would get more customers into the streaming world. And then we built the innovative features we wanted around that product - Alexa, and that's what you see today.
What are your personal ambitions for the future?
I have a wife and two kids, four- and two-year-old boys, so I spend a lot of my time with them, which is great. Professionally, at Amazon, we're just so excited and immersed in what we're doing. We have a great team, smart people, real music lovers. The fact that we can work on building a music service optimized around voice differentiates us in the marketplace. Continuing to improve and innovate on our products that's what I spend my time thinking about right now.
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