TOMTOM'S DIGITAL COCKPIT PLATFORM NOW COMES WITH AMAZON MUSIC OUT OF THE BOX
TomTom’s not letting the fact that it’s no longer at CES in-person stand in its way. Today, the geolocation tech company announced that Amazon Music has joined its ecosystem of app suppliers and partners. It’s the first music service to be announced for the company’s recently unveiled digital cockpit platform called TomTom IndiGO.
TomTom is putting a lot of emphasis on its partner ecosystem for its digital cockpit platform and with good reason too. A well bolstered set of partner apps and functionality will bring the features drivers all want, things like music, movies, podcasts and more are all possible.
With the addition of Amazon Music, TomTom IndiGO is looking like a well-heeled offering, complete with a voice assistant, app store, podcast app and now music streaming service. These are alongside all the regular features you’d expect like navigation, routing, EV services and an intuitive easy to use interface.
What does it mean for drivers?
Amazon Music is a streaming service, to make use of this function in a TomTom IndiGO equipped vehicle, drivers will need to subscribe to Amazon Prime or Amazon Music Unlimited.
Prime members will gain access to 2 million songs, while Music Unlimited subscribers will be able to listen to more than 75 million songs, not all at the same time of course.
That’s enough music for more than 4 million hours of driving and you’d never have to listen to the same song twice. In these cases, all music is ad-free too.
Users will also have access to ad-supported playlists and stations on Amazon Music.
A boon for carmakers
While drivers will have a lifetime of driving music at their fingertips, for carmakers the benefit is that they can integrate a music streaming platform, with its comprehensive library of tunes, into their vehicles easily and quickly as part of the TomTom IndiGO platform.
“Thanks to the support of our partners, carmakers can choose from a broad range of ready to use apps and services that are easily brought together through the TomTom IndiGO platform to offer users a seamless digital cockpit experience”, Antoine Saucier, Managing Director TomTom Automotive, said in the announcement.
Drivers won’t have to use their phones to access services like this in their car, rather the music feature is natively part of the vehicle’s infotainment system. Apps that are designed natively to work in a vehicle will integrate seamlessly and provide a much more consistent experience than when mirroring a phone-based app.
It’s all about choice
Really what matters here is that drivers are starting to get choice and that’s all a result of how easy and simple it is to integrate apps with TomTom IndiGO. The open nature of the platform means that Amazon Music is likely to be just one of many third-party provider partner apps. It’s only just getting started.
Amazon Music is just one part of a growing ecosystem of natively integrated apps and partners coming to TomTom’s new digital cockpit platform. If this is a sign of things to come; good times (and tunes) await.
Author - Matthew Beedham
