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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.
What changes is the strategic bundling, not the sonic outcome. By separating spoken‑word value adds from the music service itself, Amazon appears to be acknowledging that many listeners run a dedicated hi‑fi stack where audiobooks are orthogonal to the listening use case. For users focused on album‑centric playback, gapless sequencing, and consistent mastering across devices, Standard functions as a clean, music‑only subscription with fewer ancillary hooks. It also hints at Amazon’s longer‑term platform thinking: music quality is now table stakes, while differentiation is pushed to cross‑service ecosystems. For audiophiles, the practical implication is simple—plan selection no longer dictates the resolution or spatial format of the stream, only the extras that ride alongside it.
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