Is Amazon entering subscription music streaming?

Amazon has quietly started to set up a streaming music service to launch in the third quarter of the year, sources in the US told the New York Post.

Its $99 a year Amazon Prime shopping service already offers 1 million songs in its database to subscribers (estimated to be 54 million in America alone).

It already claims to sell the most amount of physical music in the US and second for digital music. It offers an MP3 download service (obviously getting irrelevant as music fans take the leap to streaming) and is also predominant in the world of books, movies and television.

But now it wants to create a stand-alone service to take on the likes of Spotify, Apple Music, Google Music and Pandora. It is believed that the move intensified after executives realised that after Amazon Prime recently launched in Germany and Japan, the Prime music streaming hours rose triple-fold.

Its VP of Digital Music, Steve Boom, is holding discussions with label executives to license tracks.

Early indications are it will be charge the industry rate of $9.99 a month. But those who buy their Echo speaker will get the new service for $3-$4 a month.