Eight years after it launched in India, Amazon Music is changing the way it does business in the country. The audio-streaming service, which was only available to subscribers of Amazon’s Prime loyalty programme, is now being sold as the stand-alone product Amazon Music Unlimited.
Priced at Rs119 (approx. $1.25) per month for non-Prime members—and Rs99 (approx. $1.05) for Prime members—Amazon Music Unlimited will give subscribers access to ad-free listening and the ability to download tracks to hear offline. Those benefits, which were previously given to Prime subscribers, will no longer be provided to them starting 2 July.
That’s the same date Amazon Music will start its free tier, which offers “shuffle-based, ad-supported listening”, in India. Additionally, both Prime and non-Prime users can try Amazon Music Unlimited—which comes with the additional feature of higher sound quality (in HD, Ultra HD and Spatial Audio including Dolby Atmos)—for free for six months and three months respectively.
Its Rs119 tag matches that of Gaana’s monthly subscription and sits right in the middle of the price points of JioSaavn’s individual Pro plan, which is currently being peddled at Rs99, and Spotify’s Premium Standard offering, which was reduced to Rs139 (approx. $1.45) last month.
Amazon Music’s decision to have a range of customer choices—a free tier, the existing Prime tier, and the Unlimited tier—follows a slowdown in the growth of subscribers in India over the past couple of years. That’s a metric they undoubtedly aim to increase following this move. “We’ve always looked upon it as, how can we make it as a sustainable business in the long run?,” Rishabh Gupta, the country head of Amazon Music India, told Music Ally in November 2025.
Industry stakeholders, meanwhile, are bound to have a mixed reaction. Rights owners will laud the rise in the pricing while casting a side-eye at the free tier at a time they have been consistently calling on DSPs to shift to paid models to boost India’s recorded music business, which has been outpaced by other countries in the region in recent years.
