You and I have exceedingly different definitions of "free." It's not even ad-sponsored free like basic Spotify is, it's a full-on paid product that comes bundled with other paid products. So the price of Amazon Prime (which just went up) reflects this half-baked music streaming service. I'm paying for this, as is everyone else posting complaints about it (because only paid Prime members can access it).
Good point, I should change the question to why is there an expectation that every song be accessible to Prime members without an extra charge?
I just don't understand the negativity towards this service because it isn't exactly what some people want. I see it as a bonus to a service I already gladly pay for. If it doesn't have every song that I would want, so what? I have access to more stuff then I did before at the same cost.
1) Because it's like Spotify, but worse. It's not even like Amazon Prime Instant, which offers different content from Netflix, so the two can function like compliments. It's simply just a worse version of Spotify.
2) I don't have the numbers on this, but I suspect that a large portion of Amazon's Prime subscribers have a subscription to Spotify, or Google All-Access, or Beats, or something in that market segment. (And I'm guessing that probability goes up among HN commenters.) If you do, you gain nothing and lose quite a bit from switching outright to Amazon's service, so you can't swap your current streaming service for this. There's no value-add for you.
3) This is the first major feature for Prime that Amazon has rolled out since the price hike a few months ago. So nobody is viewing this as free, or close to. Everyone is looking at this as "what they're spending the price hike on." And it's so far behind the competition.
4) The really limited selection combined with the really terrible discoverability means that everyone trying it out for the first time is going to have a much easier time finding music Prime doesn't have streaming fee than they are finding music it does have streaming free. It's almost like a service designed with the intention of making you discover its pain points as quickly as possible.
