Amazon Music launched its ‘Country Heat’ playlist in October 2016, as one of its flagship curation brands. Five years on, and it has reached an important milestone. No, not playlisting more than 2,000 tracks about whisky and/or big trucks. The milestone is more than 13bn streams in the US alone.
This is for ‘Country Heat’ as a brand, so that includes the playlist, its radio station and in Amazon Music’s DJ mode.
Billboard reported that the station has also quadrupled its streams between 2017 and 2020 as more country music fans adopted streaming in general, and Amazon Music in particular.
But what was that about hard liquor? Amazon is celebrating the five-year anniversary with a ‘Country Music Month’ this October, including launching a playlist called ‘Whisky & Tequila’ that will mix country tracks with regional Mexican music.
That’s one of the interesting cultural crossovers happening around country at the moment: Latin artists influenced by it, who are starting to build their audiences in the US too.
This story was amended on 5 October to reflect that the 13bn streams milestone is for the overall ‘Country Heat’ brand, and the quadrupled streams were for the radio station not the playlist.
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