Amazon Music tests AI-powered "Explore" search for superfans

When you search for an artist on a streaming app, you usually just get a wall of their most-streamed tracks and newest releases. If you want to know who they’ve collaborated with or find deep cuts, you usually end up jumping over to Wikipedia.

Amazon wants to keep you inside its app instead. The company just rolled out a beta test for a new AI-powered search tool called Explore, built to give fans a deeper dive into their favorite artists.

Deep cuts, collaborations, and a little self-promotion

To check it out, users tap the Find button, search for an artist, and hit a new Explore tab in the top-left corner. Instead of a flat list of albums, the AI serves up a richer overview, including collaborations, related artists you might not have heard yet, and key discography highlights.

Search for Jelly Roll, for example, and the tool points you toward his duet with Lainey Wilson on Save Me. Amazon is also using this real estate to plug its own originals, like his exclusive cover of Should've Been A Cowboy featuring T-Pain.

On top of artist trivia, Explore ties directly into Maestro, the AI playlist maker Amazon launched last year to rival Spotify's AI DJ. Once you're done reading, you can generate a tailored playlist with a single tap.

Limited rollouts and an exclusive catalog

Before you run to check your phone, there are a few caveats. The beta is currently rolling out only to select Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers on iOS in the United States.

It is also limited in catalog size. Amazon says Explore currently supports around 10,000 artists, pointing to global acts like Bad Bunny and BLACKPINK as early examples.

That means unless you're searching for mainstream or charting artists, the new AI tab probably won't have much to say just yet.

Why it matters

For music fans, Explore turns passive listening into something closer to an interactive artist biography, without making you open a web browser. But it's certainly not worth rushing to subscribe for right now, given the small artist pool and the fact that it is locked behind a US-only iOS beta.

From a platform perspective, streaming catalogs are essentially identical across the board, so the battleground has shifted to AI curation and user retention. Amazon launched Maestro last year to counter Spotify's AI push, and weaving it into artist discovery keeps that momentum going.

We think Amazon's angle here is cleverly calculated. The company recently bumped its Music Unlimited subscription up by a buck to $11 a month, and shiny new features like Explore give them an easy way to justify that price hike while quietly routing listeners to Amazon-exclusive originals. The obvious challenge is depth. If Amazon can't expand past these initial 10,000 mainstream names quickly, users will go right back to getting their music trivia from Reddit and Wikipedia.