Report: Amazon To Challenge Spotify, Apple Music

The e-commerce giant Amazon has held meetings in the past few weeks to discuss licensing tunes for a full-blown subscription music service that would ape streaming music market leaders Spotify and Apple Music.

According to The NY Post, the plan is the latest attempt by Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos to become the premier distributor of entertainment content from books to TV and movies to music.

Amazon currently offers about 1 million songs to customers of its $99 per year Prime shopping service. The planned stand-alone music streaming service would come with its own monthly fee..

It will feature a much more robust music selection than is now available via Prime.

Amazon claims to be the biggest seller of physical music in the US and the No. 2 seller of digital music.

E-commerce sales in the past 12 months were $71.8 billion, up 5.6 percent on the prior period, according to an eMarketer note out Wednesday. Walmart is in second place with just $13.5 billion.