Amazon Prime members can now consume 100 million song and ad-free podcasts

Amazon raised the annual price of its Prime Membership price earlier this year from $119 to $139 earlier this year. But has been adding more benefits to the plan like a Grubhub+ membership. In the latest move, the company is now including access to a larger Amazon Music catalog and ad-free listening to the top podcasts.

The company said that Prime members can listen to all of Amazon Music's 100 million songs on shuffle mode without any ads. Earlier, Prime members could access 2 million songs and playlists curated by experts.

Amazon said this update enables users to play any artist, album, or playlist on shuffle mode along with some All-Access playlists on demand.

What's more, Amazon is allowing ad-free access to top podcasts from CNN, NPR, The New York Times, and ESPN like "Dr. Death," "SmartLess," and "Even the Rich." Plus, users can listen to Amazon Originals like "MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories," "Suspect: Vanished in the Snow," "COLD Season Three: The Search for Sheree," and the premier of "Baby, this is Keke Palmer" from NOPE actress Keke Palmer.

The company is also rolling out a new interface for podcast previews, which allows users to listen to short clips from the show and swipe through them to discover new content. Notably, podcast apps like Snpid have used AI-powered short previews to fuel podcast discovery.

If users don't like the default Amazon Music experience included with the Prime membership, they can subscribe to Amazon Prime Unlimited for $8.99/month or $89/year. This will give them access to all songs on-demand in HD (16-bit/44.1 kHz) and UHD 24-bit/44.1 to 192 kHz) quality across all devices. Plus, this premium tier offers millions of songs in the spatial audio format.

However, the feature extension to Amazon Music with Prime membership might entice a lot of users after Apple Music's increased subscription prices and a potential price hike in Spotify's plans.