Amazon’s Prime Day wants to lure you in with Taylor Swift concert
Amazon is doing its best to turn Prime Day into a weeklong retail extravaganza, with Taylor Swift as the bait.
The company on Thursday announced that Swift will headline the retailer’s first Prime Day Concert, to be streamed live on July 10, a full five days before Amazon’s annual blowout begins. She’ll be joined by Dua Lipa, SZA and Becky G., with actress Jane Lynch hosting.
The catch? You have to be an Amazon Prime member to see the show.
Of course, there’s a promotional deal to fix that, if you’re willing to sign up for the free month of membership. And for a tiny fee, members can try the Amazon Music Unlimited upsell for a few months.
Then, starting July 10, members can ask their Amazon tool, Alexa, either to play the Prime Day Concert playlist on Amazon Music or to show the concert using their (only-at-Amazon) Fire TV or Echo Show devices.
During the concert, which will stream on Amazon’s Prime Video, clips and teasers from other Prime Video offerings will play. Members also can stream the concert on demand for a limited time afterward, perhaps to while away the hours until Amazon’s Prime Day sale, which starts at midnight July 15 and runs for 48 hours.
We see what you did there, Amazon, and will pause for a moment to let the overwhelming marketing synergy wash over us.
T-Swift, who has experience with corporate partnerships, retweeted Amazon’s post about the concert, which the company said will stream live in more than 200 countries.
Sellers Target and EBay reportedly will have June 15-16 sales as well, presumably to capitalize on the competition’s wave, but they don’t have a 10-time Grammy winner leading the charge. Amazon itself might be trying to spread out signups in advance of its sale in an attempt to head off anything like last year’s embarrassing Prime Day website outage.
“Prime Day brings members the best of both entertainment and shopping,” said Steve Boom, vice president of Amazon Music, in a statement. “To celebrate, we’ve curated a lineup across multiple genres with performances from artists our customers love.”
Alexa, let the celebration begin.
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