Our discoverability audit of Prime Video and Amazon Music

This audit was commissioned by Amazon and independently conducted by Arvester during November 2025 - March 2026. The views expressed in this article and the studies are solely those of the authors. Any inaccuracies or oversights are the authors' sole responsibility.

Download the report on the data for France here, and the report for Germany here.

Success online, for any film, series, album or artist, requires a minimum level of discoverability, that much is certain. And while a high degree of discoverability does not always translate into an equally high number of views or listens, it does help a work meet its audience. This is why, in an era of seemingly endless catalogues, discoverability has become something of a hot topic in the cultural industries.

Amazon gave us the opportunity to conduct an audit of the interfaces of Prime Video and Amazon Music to find out exactly what kinds of content benefit from a high level of prominence. Both services offer extremely large catalogues, so large in fact that the visibility of local works and artists on the interface cannot be considered a given. One could easily picture a Prime Video homepage made up entirely of US productions, or an Amazon Music interface populated solely by the world’s top-selling artists. For local works and artists to feature prominently on these services requires some kind of editorial input, whether that is at the level of the recommender system, by assigning more weight to certain categories of content, or at the level of the user interface itself, by deliberately positioning content in prominent zones.

Our methodologies (one for Prime Video, one for Amazon Music) were devised to measure the discoverability of different categories of content while taking into account the viewing and listening habits of various user profiles. We conducted our experiment in Germany and France, from November 2025 to January 2026.

Prime Video

Methodology

To evaluate how user choice interacts with algorithmic recommendations, we conducted a rigorous eight-week experiment using three distinct user profiles:

• The local profile: Wholly dedicated to domestic works, watching two hours of German or French titles each week.
• The international profile: Focused entirely on foreign works, watching two hours of non-German or non-French titles weekly.
• The blank profile: Acted as a strict control group by never watching anything.

Every Friday, the full homepages of these profiles were scanned from local IP addresses via a web browser. Every row was scrolled entirely to the bottom and to the right to capture the complete layout composition. This allowed us to collect every single thumbnail, whether the title was "Included with Prime", transactional (rent/buy), or part of an add-on third-party channel. While data collection occurred via web browsers, comparative tests on Smart TV applications revealed identical structures, row counts, and title positions, confirming our findings apply uniformly across platforms.

To calculate overall visibility, a custom discoverability score (1 to 100) was assigned to each thumbnail based on its vertical and horizontal positioning, alongside its physical size on screen. Independent metadata regarding countries of production was collected using themoviedb.org (TMDB), and works were classified as European when at least one of their countries of production had signed the Television Without Frontiers Directive, which therefore includes the UK, Norway and Turkey.

Findings

The scale of a typical Prime Video homepage is vast, averaging 180 rows in Germany (fluctuating between 19,576 and 30,527 total thumbnails) and 141 rows in France (spanning 25,616 to 32,061 thumbnails). Despite this density, local and regional works achieve substantial real estate:

• All profiles combined, France ranks as the second most discoverable country of production on the French service, with French titles securing an 18% average share of total homepage thumbnails. Germany ranks as the third most discoverable country on its domestic service, capturing a 13% average thumbnail share.
• Prominent real estate heavily favours regional content. In Germany, German titles claim 16% of the highly visible top 10 rows. In France, domestic titles occupy 18% of the top 10 rows.
• European titles represent 37% of all thumbnails on the German homepage and 39% on the French homepage. This presence jumps up to 41% (Germany) and 43% (France) within the top 10 rows. This is structurally supported by dedicated, named rows such as "Séries européennes" or "Europäische Serien", with Europe being the only geographic region outside the domestic country to receive explicit, named category highlights.
• Amazon productions represent on average about 4% of all thumbnails on the homepage in Germany and France.

The massive amount of data that we collected for this audit (almost 1.5 million individual thumbnails and their positions) has given us unprecedented insight into the rules and systems that determine the layout of a Prime Video homepage. For instance, regardless of individual viewing patterns, the discoverability score for local works never seemed to drop below its initial baseline level. This points to a hardcoded level of prominence built into the interface layout system that operates independently of user behaviours.

Even when a user deliberately avoids domestic content over an extended period, the baseline remains remarkably sticky. In Germany, after eight consecutive weeks of watching only foreign works, the discoverability of domestic titles had even increased. In France, it dropped only by 16%.

The baseline is even more apparent for European works, whose discoverability in both Germany and France remained remarkably stable for all users. Even fluctuations in the size of the homepage in Germany (up to 10k additional or fewer thumbnails) had no effect on the prominence of European titles.

One should note that the existence of a baseline ensuring a minimum level of discoverability to local works does not mean that they are necessarily stuck at that level. In France, the profile that watched only French works saw their discoverability jump by 55% over eight weeks. In Germany, local titles saw their discoverability increase by 39% when the user watched only German titles.

All in all, when it comes to the discoverability of local works on Prime Video, a floor seems to exist but no ceiling, meaning that the recommender system cannot make local works disappear from the homepage, but it can make them more prominent if they align with the user’s taste.

Titles produced by Amazon (“Originals”) show very little variation in their prominence on the homepage. They make up about 4% of all thumbnails in France and Germany and tend to appear on the first half of the page, though it should be noted that the second half is mostly occupied by third-party channels and aggregated services.

Amazon Music

Methodology

Our decision to retain only the homepage on Prime Video was motivated by its centrality in the user experience. On Amazon Music, we decided to widen our scope because the homepage is much smaller and other important factors affect the discoverability of artists and their music. The onboarding process is decisive in understanding a user’s taste and surfacing personalised recommendations. It is also a space where suggestions are made to the user prior to knowing their preferences, thus revealing the service’s editorial intent. In terms of usage, playlists are a core feature and so their compositions also needed to be taken into account.

Music streaming services are highly personalised ecosystems. We created four profiles with different tastes, expressed during the onboarding process by selecting artists that correspond to these criteria:

• Local pop: set up using 6 local pop artists.
• International pop: set up using 6 foreign pop artists.
• Mixed pop: 3 local and 3 foreign artists.
• Indie: Built around 3 local independent and 3 foreign independent artists.

All logging was conducted from the Android mobile application using regional IP addresses. Data was collected from the three zones that we identified earlier:

• The Artist Taste Collection, which is displayed to the user during the onboarding process in order to personalise the service,
• The first personalised homepage that is shown to the user once their profile has been created,
• The composition of all playlists that were featured on the homepage.

The discographies and countries of origin of all artists were extracted via their page on musicbrainz.org. Artists were classified as "emerging" if their debut commercial release (single or album) was under five years old (post-January 2021) and they had published fewer than five albums.

Findings

Local artists and their music are highly visible on Amazon Music:

• New users are nudged towards local artists immediately. Local artists make up the second largest share of the Artist Taste Collection during onboarding (20.4% in Germany, 19.2% in France). Crucially, they feature heavily in the categories that are shown first to users, occupying 40% of the German "Beliebt" category and more than 50% of the French "Populaire" category.
• Across all profiles, local artists are prominent on the homepage. French artists account for an average of 44% of all track, album, and artist thumbnails on the homepage, making France the most promoted country of origin on the page. German artists occupy on average 32.6% of the German layout, placing them neck-and-neck with the United States (34.3%) and far ahead of British artists (<10%).
• Even when a profile selects only foreign artists during setup, the interface maintains a strong local focus. The international pop profile was still served a homepage layout consisting of 28% German music in Germany and 35% French music in France.
• Playlists that are featured on the homepage consistently rank tracks by local artists higher than tracks by their foreign counterparts. In fact, the homepage in Germany features on average 12 playlists containing more than 80% German tracks and 13 playlists with more than 80% French tracks in France.

This last finding points to a baseline similar to the one on Prime Video, whereby the discoverability of local content cannot fall below a fixed threshold. Further testament to this is the fact that this exposure remains flat across profiles: users who chose only foreign artists during onboarding are still served 11 (Germany) and 10 (France) of these heavily domestic playlists.

Our audit also revealed a clear editorial intent to promote emerging artists, who represent 29% of homepage thumbnails in Germany and 27% in France. The share of emerging artists on the homepage is significantly higher than the share of emerging artists on the app overall (onboarding, homepage and playlists combined), which stands at 19% in both France and Germany. Although emerging artists appear less frequently than established artists on the homepage, the recommender system compensates by placing them in more prominent spots. In Germany, a thumbnail for an emerging artist achieves an average discoverability score of 51, compared to 47 for established acts. France displays a similar trend, with emerging artists achieving a 50 vs 45 score advantage.

Conclusion

Our experiment has yielded unambiguous results. It is clear that local works and artists enjoy a high level of discoverability on Prime Video and Amazon Music. It was not the goal of the present study to determine whether this level of observed discoverability is attributable to regulatory requirements or to commercial incentives. We were nonetheless able to detect a strong editorial intent to promote French, German and European works and artists, as evidenced by the fact that they remain discoverable even when the user displays a strong affinity for foreign content. Another indication of an editorial slant benefitting local works and artists is the presence of Europe-themed categories on Prime Video (“Made in Europe”, “Titres européens populaires”, “Europäische Filme” etc.) and of playlists consisting almost exclusively of local artists on Amazon Music (“Deutschpop”, “Nouveautés Variété Française”, “Electro’lala” etc.), which always feature on the homepage. Ensuring the discoverability of local works and emerging artists on user interfaces often requires some form of editorial intervention, which can manifest itself at the level of the recommender system by establishing rules, weights and thresholds, or in the manual positioning of titles and categories. Both of these strategies seem to have been implemented on Prime Video and Amazon Music in France and Germany.