Amazon just revealed one reason why it might be building a 'Spotify killer'

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jeff bezos

REUTERS/Abhishek N. Chinnappa

Amazon is rumored to be building a robust music streaming service to compete with the likes of Spotify, and the company's Q4 earnings report gives a glimpse as to a possible reason why.

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Amazon already has a music streaming platform (Prime Music) bundled into its Prime membership package, which includes things like free 2-day shipping and access to movies and TV shows. Prime Music gives users on-demand access to over a million songs, but its catalog has always fallen short of services like Spotify or Apple Music. There simply hasn't been enough new releases for it to be in the same discussions as its more comprehensive rivals.

But data Amazon released with its Q4 earnings show that, even with its Swiss cheese catalog, the service is gaining momentum.

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Amazon says that in Q4 of 2015, Prime Music streaming hours "more than tripled" in the US compared to Q4 2014. This bump could have occurred for a variety of reasons, and Amazon doesn't elaborate on how the number of active users has changed. In 2015, worldwide paid Prime memberships increased 51% - 47% in the U.S. and even faster outside the U.S.. The additional Prime members could have contributed to the increase in streaming hours, but there's no way to know for sure.

Perhaps Jeff Bezos thinks he can unleash the potential of that demand by building what the New York Post's sources called, a "Spotify-killer."

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Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.

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