Photo Credit: Discord + Amazon Music
Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers can now host a Listening Party using a new Activity in Discord voice calls and text chats.
Voice call and text chat community platform Discord has evolved significantly over the years: from its humble beginnings for small gaming communities to a platform where artists can gather their superfans and host movie nights, and much more. Now, Amazon Music is partnering with Discord to launch an “Amazon Music Listening Party” activity on Discord.
Activities are basically apps within Discord enabling a variety of features that used to primarily come from user-created bots — some of these bots would let users play music on their servers, but often ran against the policies of platforms like YouTube, used as the source for the music. In fact, several music-related bots were shut down in recent years following cease-and-desist orders from YouTube.
But Discord activities like Amazon Music’s allow users to listen to music and podcasts together within Discord without running afoul of copyright and policy. An Amazon Music Listening Party allows an Amazon Music Unlimited subscriber to synchronize their music library with Discord; groups of friends can share a single queue to build a playlist across their libraries to listen to together in text chats and voice calls.
Amazon is offering a three-month trial for Amazon Music Unlimited to new users as part of the Discord launch to make it easier for groups of friends who use other streaming services. The big restriction on such an offering is obviously that it relies on users subscribing to Amazon’s music streaming service in the first place.
It should be interesting to see how such integration expands as Discord continues to grow and other music streaming services consider making a similar offering for their users. Amazon might face some competition from the likes of Rhythm, a former Discord bot that returned with licensing deals and a $4.99 per month subscription service earlier this summer.
