Amazon has expanded its Music Unlimited streaming service to 28 additional countries, offering up its catalogue of over 40m songs to more people around the world.

Amazon launched Music Unlimited in October last year, as it looked to position itself as a competitor to Spotify and Apple by relying heavily on Alexa as its distinguishing factor. Since then it has expanded to countries like the UK, Germany, Austria, and Japan.

“Music is such an incredible global connector, and with Amazon Music Unlimited we’ve been able to give listeners access to an extensive catalogue with the added experience of using their own voice to hear music in so many ways with Alexa,” said Steve Boom, VP of Amazon Music. “Today’s announcement signifies an important moment for Amazon Music Unlimited and our international customers as we continue to offer more music fans all over the world a completely new way to hear expertly-curated playlists and songs from their favourite artists.”

The eCommerce giant has now opened up the service to people in Belgium, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Sweden, and Uruguay.

The expansion to almost 30 countries for Amazon’s music streaming service comes just after it was reported that Google was preparing to launch a music streaming offering of its own called YouTube Remix.