Why is My Media for Alexa charged as a subscription instead of a one-off?

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bizmodeller
Posts: 458
Joined: Thu Nov 14, 2013 8:40 pm

Why is My Media for Alexa charged as a subscription instead of a one-off?

Post by bizmodeller »

We often get asked why My Media is charged as a subscription rather than a single one off app download or even free.

Firstly - remember we are not affiliated/associated/paid for by Amazon. We are a completely independent company who wants to help users listen to their music easily with Alexa devices, particularly since Amazon has stopped support for uploading your own music to Amazon Music. We wanted to give users another solution.

As an independent company, we need to charge something for My Media - it's taken a considerable amount of R&D, development and testing to reach this level of maturity.

The reason we charge a subscription instead of a one off charge is that we need to pay for ongoing cloud services for each My Media Server. Our My Media Cloud Servers sit between the My Media Server app (that runs on your computer) and Alexa's own cloud services. When you make a My Media skill request to Alexa, the voice request is sent from your Echo device to Amazon's servers for initial processing. The request then gets sent to our servers where we do further processing and match it against your My Media Server based on your Amazon linked ID. That request is then picked up by your My Media server which checks its index of your media for the tracks to play, returns the results to our servers which returns the results to Amazon's servers which returns the results to your Echo device. Yes! There's a lot of hops, but these are architectural constrains of the Alexa service.

So our servers need to scale based on the number of concurrent users using My Media and this will grow over time. If you carry on using My Media (which we hope you do!) we need to pay for our server time to support your requests.

We hope that the price of My Media for Alexa - which equates to about one reassuringly expensive beer per year - is sufficiently accessible that this doesn't dissuade people from using our service.
Dave D
Posts: 2
Joined: Sat Sep 29, 2018 12:36 pm

Re: Why is My Media for Alexa charged as a subscription instead of a one-off?

Post by Dave D »

Would just like to say the price wasn't an issue and I opted for the premium package, even if I don't need it all, just to support a project I believe in.
Many of us have vast music collections, and this allows us use on what is becoming a standard format for home streaming of playlists etc.

The price difference is almost negligible.

Thanks :)
bizmodeller
Posts: 458
Joined: Thu Nov 14, 2013 8:40 pm

Re: Why is My Media for Alexa charged as a subscription instead of a one-off?

Post by bizmodeller »

Thanks :)
soundog
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon Nov 23, 2020 2:09 am

Re: Why is My Media for Alexa charged as a subscription instead of a one-off?

Post by soundog »

The feature set easily justifies the subscription price. I was impressed and surprised by how robust the demo was, and how easy the setup was, so I subscribed.
braix123
Posts: 7
Joined: Fri Dec 18, 2020 6:56 pm

Re: Why is My Media for Alexa charged as a subscription instead of a one-off?

Post by braix123 »

Thanks for the explanation. I thought that at least the way back to the request can be shortened. A really complex development. The price is really not the problem either.
Keep it up! I hope that Amazon doesn't block one day!
HANNTHEFTAUDIO
Posts: 13
Joined: Sat Mar 11, 2023 1:32 am

Re: Why is My Media for Alexa charged as a subscription instead of a one-off?

Post by HANNTHEFTAUDIO »

Right now I'm wondering about the price hike. I just checked the price of the renewal to make sure I had enough (I know I only paid $5 last year), only to find it's almost as much as spotify ($11 for Spotify Premium) right now. And all this because I want to play my own music collection on my Echo Show 8.
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