Following hot on the heels of Apple, Amazon have now launched their own music streaming platform to rival Spotify.

The new service which has been imaginatively named Amazon Prime Music is now available to new and existing Amazon Prime customers, offering them on-demand access to some 1 million tracks.

This may sound a lot but compared to rivals, some of which offer over 30 million different tracks, it's somewhat disappointing.

With this in mind, the service may not attract many new customers solely with the intention of using their Prime subscription for music streaming but when it's taken into consideration that this service is available to Prime customers in addition to the existing TV and film service, it becomes rather more attractive.

Another point that leaves Amazon Prime Music currently falling short of its competitors is that many popular artists such as Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga are not available to be streamed and other artists such as George Ezra and Madonna that do appear on the platform do not have full back catalogues available.

Christopher North, Managing Director at Amazon UK said: "UK customers loved it when we added Prime Instant Video and unlimited photo storage into Prime last year, on top of Unlimited One-Day Delivery on millions of items and access to over 800,000 Kindle titles to borrow.

"We said then that we were just getting started, and today we're introducing Prime Music - more than a million songs from best-selling artists, plus hundreds of Prime Playlists hand-built by our team of music experts - all at no additional cost."

Amazon have insisted that their aim is not to compete directly with services such as Apple Music but rather that they are focussed on enhancing the overall experience of Prime customers.