Rumors: Amazon’s new Spotify competitor

Amazon is reportedly in talks to launch a free, ad-supported music service, which would directly compete with Spotify, Pandora and YouTube (owned by Google).

But Amazon may be taking a different approach to “free” listening — and it will involve asking Alexa. Reports suggest that you'll only able to listen to Amazon's music service through Echo-connect speakers.

For clarity, Amazon already has a music steaming service — Amazon Music — which it launched way back in 2007. Launching a free music service that exclusively plays through Echo speakers would really be more of a retail play, in that you'd have to own an Echo device to use it.

Spotify is currently the only major streaming music subscription service with a free tier, and YouTube has always been free to use. As such, this new format from Amazon might appeal to folks who currently listen to music on YouTube — it would be a similar listening experience (one with ads) but without a screen.

It's rumored that Amazon could launch this service as early as this week. In the meantime, here's a few other products to shake up your music listening:

AirBuddy makes it easy to listen to music with your AirPods on the Mac 👂

Playlist Shuffle creates Amazing playlists with an AI bot 🎵

Tidal for Amazon Echo is...exactly what you think it is 🔊

Roadtrip is kind of like running your own radio station 📻

Generative.fm is endlessly ambient music 😌

Flow State is two hours of free music for working, every day 🙌

And of course there's a whole slew of apps that help you find new music.

ICYMI: A 13-year-old developer took a “request for product” tweet to heart. And the result is awesome.

“At one of my IT classes I was extremely bored and saw a tweet by @peterkringdon "Request for product: tinder for building a grocery list" and after searching for datasets and coding for a couple of hours, I made docket.”