Amazon Prime Video Will Start Showing Ads on January 29th

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Chris Welch, writing for The Verge:

Earlier this year, Amazon announced plans to start incorporating ads into movies and TV shows streamed from its Prime Video service, and now the company has revealed a specific date when you’ll start seeing them: it’s January 29th. “This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time,” the company said in an email to customers about the pending shift to “limited advertisements.”

Big loser energy.

Amazon Music Comes to Prime for Free

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The Verge:

Steve Boom is the VP of Amazon Music, and he has a great name for the music business. He’s on the show because Amazon just announced that it is upgrading the music service that Prime members get as part of their subscription. Starting today, one of the benefits for Amazon Prime members is that you now get access to the entire Amazon Music catalog, about 100 million songs, to play in shuffle mode. That service used to only contain 2 million songs.

Bo Burnham’s Jeff Bezos Songs Jump in Streams

Jeff Bezos

Billboard:

Streams of “Bezos I” and “Bezos II,” Bo Burnham’s Jeff Bezos-focused songs from his latest comedy special and corresponding album Inside, jumped 21% in the wake of the Amazon founder and richest person in the world’s brief trip into space on July 20.

On July 20 and 21, “Bezos I” earned 1.4 million U.S. on-demand streams, up 22% from 1.2 million the two days prior to his launch (July 18 and 19), according to MRC Data.

Amazon Announces Vinyl Subscription Service

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Rolling Stone:

Amazon says that it’s selecting albums from the “golden era of vinyl,” which it defines as the 1960s and 1970s. Its music team singles out Pink Floyd, Aretha Franklin, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Miles Davis and Abba as examples of artists that fit their criteria. One Amazon user noted that the first two albums released to subscribers werePink Floyd’s The Wall and London Calling by The Clash.

Display Book Covers on Your Kindle Lock Screen

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The Verge:

The Display Cover feature is only supported on some Kindle devices without ads. These devices include the Kindle (8th, 10th generation), Kindle Paperwhite (7th, 10th gen), Kindle Oasis (8th, 9th, 10th gen), and Kindle Voyage (7th gen). If you can’t recall which Kindle you have then click here to identify it. Promotions on ad-supported devices can be disabled for $20, or by calling into customer support and asking real nicely, according to many reports on redditkindle.

Supported Kindle devices running the latest firmware can activate the Display Cover feature by enabling the Show Cover option under Settings, Device Options

Finally.

Amazon Music Gets Podcasts

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The Verge:

Amazon Music now offers podcasts. The company issued an update today that brings more than 70,000 shows to the platform, including some major titles, like Serial and Pod Save America, as well as new exclusive deals like a show with DJ Khaled called The First One, where he’ll interview artists about their breakthrough hits and the stories behind them. Disgraceland, a popular show from iHeartMedia, will also become exclusive to the platform starting in February 2021.

GoodReads Sucks

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Sarah Manavis, writing at New Statesman:

With the vast amount of books and user data that Goodreads holds, it has the potential to create an algorithm so exact that it would be unstoppable, and it is hard to imagine anyone objecting to their data being used for such a purpose. Instead, it has stagnated: Amazon holds on to an effective monopoly on the discussion of new books – Goodreads is almost 40 times the size of the next biggest community, LibraryThing, which is also 40 per cent owned by Amazon – and it appears to be doing very little with it.

GoodReads is a really bad website and an even worse app. It could be awesome. It should be awesome. The difference between using it, and say Letterboxd for movies, is night and day. It just makes me sad.

Amazon Music and Audible Are Adding Podcasts

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Billboard:

Amazon will soon make podcasts available to its 55 million customers on Amazon Music, including its free tier, as well as on its audiobook service Audible — but only if podcasters agree to speak well of the tech and e-commerce giant. […]

There’s one catch: The content license agreement stipulates that content may not “include advertising or messages that disparage or are directed against Amazon or any Service.”

Guess I’ll have to delete the Encore episode talking about how shitty the Prime app is on Apple TV.

Amazon Stops Accepting Vinyl and CD Shipments

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Chris Willman, writing at Variety:

Amazon has announced that its warehouses has “temporarily disabled shipment creation” for discretionary items through at least April 5. That doesn’t have to do with the outflow of product from Amazon, but inflow. Amazon is declaring an immediate emphasis on the kind of household and medical supplies that have been quick to sell out, and which customers are having a hard time finding in person. Their message to record labels and distributors: Please stop sending us anything, until further notice.

The Kacey Musgraves Christmas Show

Kacey Musgraves

Kacey Musgraves is teaming up with Amazon for a holiday special:

The Kacey Musgraves Christmas Show invites fans in as Musgraves prepares for a most joyful Christmas gathering with a whimsical set and dazzling wardrobe influenced by the artist’s fresh aesthetic. Equal parts heart-warming and cleverly absurd, Musgraves pays tribute to holiday specials of the past whilst also reinventing just what a Christmas special can be, with a magically modern twist.