I’ve used the Amazon Unlimited paid music stream for several years. Since last fall, the service has become very glitchy, and because of that I’ve started a three month free trial with the Spotify premium version. For me, they both have their strong points and weak points.

First of all, there is plenty of traditional music on both services. Amazon seems to have a slightly more comprehensive collection, although I found plenty to listen to on Spotify as well.
On Spotify, I’m able to add my own music that isn’t included in the streaming service. Amazon no longer allows you to do that. I do find that the sound is somewhat better on Amazon, but that Spotify is much more user-friendly, in terms of controls. (Such as adding and deleting tracks to playlists, for example.) I also find that Amazon is very slow to respond in terms of starting music, adding things to playlists, etc. whereas Spotify usually responds immediately.

For me, the suggested music selections have been much better on Spotify that on Amazon. On Amazon, while I’m listening to a folk music album, I will get a recommendation for something like rap. On Spotify, after I added two albums of traditional French Canadian music to my library, I then got a suggested playlist, consisting completely of traditional French Canadian selections. I was familiar with most of the artists and several of the tracks, and it was a very good playlist for me in terms of my taste. Just one example, of course but the Spotify suggested playlists have been consistently good.

As of now, I am planning to keep Spotify after the free trial, assuming nothing changes on that service. I have an annual plan with Amazon until November and I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do with that. There have been many problems in the last six months with shuffle play and with voice commands not working. On two occasions, I went to delete one track from a playlist. The app froze, and when it unfroze, the entire rest of the playlist had been deleted. These are just some of the problems. I’ve had using the Amazon service over the last six months. It’s this frustration with the technical aspects of using Amazon that might lead me to drop the service.