If the global music streaming economy is a race, Amazon Music sat down somewhere around the start of 2024, and hasn’t gotten back up again.
According to the latest stats from Midia Research, Amazon’s global market share of paying music subscribers (by volume) at the close of last year was just 8.5%.
This, in turn, implies that Amazon’s total music subscriber base stood at 78.3 million. That number wasn’t just down year-over-year in terms of market share – it was down in real terms.
Midia’s 2020–2025 numbers (download here) suggest that Amazon lost around 400,000 global subscribers in 2025, despite the overall global market growing by 84.3 million subscribers.
In the same year – and in stark contrast to Amazon Music’s decline – Spotify added 27 million subs.
2025 was the latest low point in an ongoing slump for Amazon, whose music subscriber base, per Midia’s numbers, has remained flat, or down, for two years straight.
As you can see above, Midia’s global figures include the leading music streaming providers in two regions – China and Russia – where global DSPs don’t tend to operate. (Apple Music is active in China, for example, but Amazon, Spotify, and YouTube are not.)
It’s therefore worth examining how the data changes once you remove the dominant DSPs in these markets (Yandex Music in Russia; Tencent Music and NetEase Cloud Music in China).
Doing so gives us a clearer picture of music streaming’s competitive dynamic across those global regions – i.e., everywhere outside China/Russia – where the ‘big guns’ (Spotify, Amazon, Apple, YouTube) are competing head-to-head.
The results might surprise you.
They show that Spotify and YouTube have enjoyed an astonishing rise in market share over the past half-decade. For Amazon Music and Apple Music, however, the evidence is depressing.
Strip out the leading Chinese and Russian DSPs, and Midia’s numbers suggest that Spotify gained nearly four percentage points of market share in the 2020–2025 period.
YouTube Music (bundled with YouTube Premium) saw an even more impressive leap: up more than seven full percentage points from 9.5% in Q4 2020 to 16.8% in Q4 2025 (again, with the Chinese and Russian giants stripped out).
But just look at the collapse of Apple and Amazon: Apple, down five full percentage points (2020–2025) – Amazon, down just over three percentage points.
In essence, the eight combined points of market share lost by Apple Music and Amazon Music during this period have been stolen by Spotify and/or YouTube Music – who’ve then devoured some additional market share from smaller competitors.
Apple and Amazon would no doubt point to YouTube and Spotify’s obvious advantage in music streaming, particularly in high-potential global markets: they each operate a type of ‘free’ tier, and can upsell consumers into subscription from that base.
Yet there were more than 2.5 billion active Apple devices in the world at the close of last year, but only around 116 million Apple Music subscribers (per Midia’s figures).
Meanwhile, Amazon boasts 250 million paying Prime customers globally, and some 310 million active users.
Is the race already over for Amazon Music – and does its parent company actually care?
These findings obviously point to difficult questions for Apple Music, where a substantial shift in strategy may be required if it’s to have any hope of effectively competing with Spotify and YouTube Music.
According to my read of Midia’s numbers, Apple Music gained around 5.6 million subscribers in 2025, a slight acceleration on the 4.9 million increase seen in 2024. Apple’s subscriber base is nudging upward – but its market share is in freefall.
For Amazon Music, however, things are more existential. Per Midia’s data, it’s losing subs in real terms, and that global market share of 8.5% (and declining) looks in danger of sinking beneath the ‘also-ran’ threshold of 5% soon enough.
What’s more, its parent company hardly seems to prioritize Amazon Music at all.
Just take a peek at how many Amazon press releases have mentioned Amazon Music so far this year.
According to the firm’s official US press site, there have been a grand total of three. Two concern Latin music live streams carried on Amazon Prime Video; the other announces a podcast from Oprah Winfrey.
Further evidence of Amazon’s disinterest at a corporate level is there if you look for it.
I’ve reviewed transcripts of Amazon’s quarterly earnings calls over the past few years to tally mentions of/references to Amazon Music, Amazon Music Unlimited, or Amazon Music Prime.
Back in FY 2018, Amazon’s higher-ups were boasting of “tens of millions of paid customers” for Amazon Music, while suggesting that Amazon Music Unlimited was “grow[ing] very quickly.”
In the years since, these services have gotten far less corporate attention, with recent earnings call mentions of “music” typically referring to user behavior on Alexa.
So far in FY 2026, two earnings calls deep, the likes of Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy, and Investor Relations head Dave Fildes, have made zero mention of Amazon Music.
Indeed, the last solitary mention came in May 2025, as Jassy reeled off a long list of platforms on which Amazon’s ad sales team could flog inventory.
The priorities of Amazon’s corporate leaders clearly point elsewhere – particularly toward economic opportunities that don’t always tessellate with the music industry’s worldview.
The most extensive recent mention of “music” on Amazon earnings calls came in February 2026 (Q4 2025), when Jassy beamed that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was booming, largely thanks to demand from AI.
AWS sales growth, he noted, had accelerated to 24% YoY, representing a “$142 billion annualized run rate business.”
Pressed for case study examples of AWS’s success, Jassy stated: “Suno is a really cool example of an AWS customer that’s kind of reinvented how you can write music and build music.”
“Suno is a really cool example of an AWS customer that’s kind of reinvented how you can write music and build music.”
Andrew Jassy, Amazon, February 2026
Suno, of course, continues to be sued for alleged mass copyright infringement by Amazon Music’s two biggest rightsholder partners, Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group.
Elsewhere, Universal (among others) is also suing AI behemoth Anthropic, alleging that it illegally mass-ingested song lyrics to train Claude’s models.
To date, Amazon has invested $13 billion in Anthropic, with commitments that could push that figure beyond $30 billion.
Not quite burning books – but not exactly ‘safeguarding’ them either
One of UMG’s key accusations in its Anthropic lawsuit is that, to train its models, the AI firm illegally pirated music on a substantial scale.
Last week, 404 Media blew a comparative situation wide open.
The publication was contacted by a rare-book dealer who had noticed sudden bulk orders coming in – at volumes and turnaround speeds unheard of in the trade – from anonymous buyers.
By hiding an Apple AirTag in one such shipment – an order for nearly 1,000 books – 404 Media traced it to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The Amazon team that runs the operation there is called VGT3.
Its workers, posting online, have spelled out their daily task: cutting the binding off these rare books, scanning their contents, and then destroying them.
Asked about the operation, an Amazon spokesperson said: “Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use.”
In practice: Amazon is buying large quantities of out-of-print books, slicing off their spines, scanning the loose pages for AI training data, and throwing away what’s left.
Destroying books isn’t incidental to this process.
In a June 2025 ruling in Bartz v. Anthropic, District Judge William Alsup found that buying a print book, scanning the pages, and discarding the paper original amounted to “fair use” under US law – precisely because the digital file replaced the physical copy rather than adding to it.
Amazon appears to have absorbed the lesson that Anthropic, its $13 billion investee, learned in a California courtroom: to keep the scan legal, the book must meet its end.
This would be the same Amazon whose Amazon Music co-issued a press release with Universal Music Group in December 2024, pledging to “work collaboratively to address, among other things, unlawful AI-generated content.”
The same PR, as I’ve mentioned before, cited Amazon’s “commitment to advancing and safeguarding human artistry.”Music Business Worldwide
