Amazon Music Unlimited Price Increase Prompts New Amazon Music Standard Plan With Ad-Free HD and Spatial Audio
By HiFi Editorial28 February 2026
Key Highlights
Amazon Music Unlimited prices increase from March 10, raising annual fees from ¥9,800 to ¥10,800 and monthly fees by ¥100.
Amazon introduced a new Amazon Music Standard plan matching the old Unlimited pricing, allowing ad-free music and podcast playback.
Users can switch plans via the Amazon Music Settings page on PC browsers, selecting monthly or annual Standard options with one click.
From a signal-chain perspective, the notable takeaway is that Amazon has effectively decoupled pricing from the audio delivery stack. The newly positioned Standard tier inherits the same mastering tiers and transport layers previously associated with the top subscription: lossless FLAC streams up to 24‑bit/192kHz, Dolby Atmos and Sony 360 Reality Audio where labels permit, and full catalog access without forced shuffle. In practice, this means identical decoding behavior on supported endpoints—whether that’s a networked streamer pulling bit‑perfect data over Ethernet, or a mobile device downsampling through the OS mixer. There’s no evidence of codec downgrades, bandwidth caps, or altered loudness normalization profiles between the two tiers, which suggests Amazon is treating audio quality as a constant rather than a premium differentiator.
