Amazon Alexa makes Jeff Bezos & Steve Boom two of the most powerful men in music
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would make almost any list of the world’s most powerful people. In retail, he’s clearly on top, and in tech, he’s close to it. In book publishing, he would be the undisputed No. 1 for 10 years running. In addition to a $65 billion stake in Amazon, Bezos owns the Blue Origin rocket company, The Washington Post, his own venture capital firm and a founder’s stake in Google. He might be the most powerful businessman alive, and his company is a credible contender to be the stock market’s first trillion-dollar corporation.
But the music business remains unconquered territory for Amazon. The company’s early lead in CD retailing was undone by MP3 piracy, and during the digital downloading craze Amazon was overtaken by Apple’s iTunes Store. A 2005 internal experiment with music streaming at Amazon was scuttled before it launched, creating a opening that’s now filled by Spotify, with 40 million subscribers, and Apple Music, with 20 million. The company’s latest bid for more eardrums is Amazon Music Unlimited, a subscription-based streaming service launched in October 2016.Alexa, Amazon’s branded digital assistant, will be the determining factor in its success. The sophisticated voice-recognition algorithm that
Alexa employs has emerged during the past year as the leading technology of its kind. Having captured this lead, Bezos has been pushing Alexa hard, first through his Amazon Echo speaker, and, more recently, through its diminutive companion, the Amazon Echo Dot, which was the company’s top-selling item this past holiday season. Bezos’ enthusiasm has spread to the music industry, where executives speak in glowing terms of the devices. “The metric you look at more than any other to determine whether a subscriber is going to stick around is engagement,” says Ole Obermann, chief digital officer of Warner Music Group. “It’s still early days, but the engagement numbers we see from these devices are really, really good.”
Source: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos & Steve Boom on Starting a New ‘Golden Age’ for Music | Power 100
