Amazon Music Taps Into Community Spirit With New Fan Groups Feature Amazon is pushing hard on its music streaming service, integrating its new Alexa+ AI assistant and rolling out AI-powered playlists. Now, it is testing a community-focused feature that feels refreshingly human. The new feature is called Fan Groups, and it is designed to let users connect around shared musical interests. What makes Fan Groups particularly interesting is that they are not just curated by Amazon. Once the feature fully launches, any user will be able to create a public group. These groups can be centered on anything from a specific music genre or region to a particular time period or any other niche interest a user can imagine. Currently, Fan Groups are in a beta period and are only available to users in Canada. Amazon plans to bring the feature to other countries, including the United States, early next year. To ensure the platform is not empty for early testers, Amazon has had internal testers building out some initial groups. Accessing Fan Groups will be straightforward. A new Groups tab will appear in the Amazon Music app’s bottom navigation bar. When you open it, you will see a top section with groups you have already joined and a scrolling list of groups you can explore. Amazon showed examples like K-pop Now, Red Dirt Americana, and Indie Insiders, which are all fairly self-explanatory in their focus. Inside each group, there is a featured playlist at the top. Below that, a feed of posts from group members appears. Members can share any song, album, or playlist from Amazon Music and attach a comment to it, sparking discussions. The format will feel very familiar to anyone who has used a Facebook Group. Interestingly, Amazon is also allowing users to share external links within their posts. Beyond the main social feed, there is a separate music-only tab that simply lists every track and album that has been shared to the group. One of the most compelling features is the ability to hit a play button and listen to a continuous stream of everything shared in the group over time. This is a powerful tool for music discovery and for quickly gauging if the group’s collective taste aligns with your own. This new feature stands out as a social tool that could be genuinely useful. Music is inherently social, and fans love to share their discoveries. While algorithms and AI are powerful, getting recommendations from real people offers a different and often more personal path to discovery. The main challenge for Amazon will be gaining traction. Building a social network within a specific app is difficult when users can already share music on numerous other platforms like Facebook. However, the potential to find new music and connect with like-minded obsessive fans makes Fan Groups a feature worth watching when it launches more broadly next year.
