Prime Day, Amazon’s shameless annual bonanza of random discounts on largely niche items, has arrived. If your house is already full to brimming with flat-screen televisions, balaclavas, and smartphone-controlled ceiling fans, however, consider the excellent sale that Amazon is quietly offering on one of its most under-promoted products—music streaming.
Today, Amazon Music Unlimited is available to new Prime members for four months at $0.99. (It jumps to $7.99 a month after that.) That’s virtually half a year of access to music streaming for free.
Do not expect bells and whistles: Amazon Music Unlimited is a modest rival to giants like Spotify and Apple Music, and it doesn’t boast about algorithmic prowess or original content the way its competitors do. It was a latecomer to the game, and it remains lagging behind the others in popularity.
Yet the service—which, it’s important to note, is distinct from Amazon Prime Music, a small-scale mainstream streaming catalog that comes included with Prime membership—offers all that the average streaming user needs: tens of millions of songs at immediate access. If you don’t already have a streaming subscription, this is the best deal on the market right now from solely a price standpoint.
Amazon, a company infamous for hurtling products into every industry known to man, knows that Music Unlimited is unlikely to ever surpass Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, or any other streaming service in music lovers’ hearts; its streaming platform is utilitarian and mainstream rather than personal and hand-crafted. By setting the price ridiculously low today, however, Amazon accomplishes two feats: luring new subscribers in via a good deal alone, and adding all the more incentive for people to pay $99 a year for Prime, thus embedding themselves into the indomitable Amazon empire.
For other Prime Day deals, here is Quartz’s guide to wading through the deluge.