If you’ve got an Amazon Alexa device in the house and a Spotify subscription, you can stream your music through the speakers. We’ll explain how to link the two together and set up Spotify for all your default music and podcast playing.
When you first head into Alexa’s list of music services, you’ll see that Spotify is missing from the list. Therefore, the first thing you need to do is add Spotify. After that it’s simply a case of making Spotify your default player, assuming that’s what you want. Here are step-by-step instructions on how to do that.
How to play Spotify on Alexa
Time needed: 2 minutes
How to change the Alexa app settings to make Spotify the default music service
- Open the Alexa app
At the bottom of the screen, click on More, then Settings. Scroll down the resulting Settings list and click on Music & Podcasts.
- Add Spotify as a new music service
Under the Services section, click on Link New Service and then select Spotify.
- Activate the Spotify Skill
This will now show the Spotify skill, which you will need to activate using the “Enable To Use button. This will prompt you to log into your Spotify account.
- Make Spotify your default service
At this stage Spotify is now successfully added to your Alexa. However, for Alexa to use Spotify by default, you need to make a further change. Head back into your list of music service and should see an option at the top named Default Services. Click on this. Under the three categories that appear – Music, Artist & Genre Stations, and Podcasts – click on any to change the default music player to Spotify.
And that’s it! Spotify is connected, set up and now the default way of playing music. Say “Alexa, play James Blunt” at any point to have Spotify ruin your day.
Is that Spotify skill okay to use?
You may have noticed in the above screenshot that the Spotify skill for Alexa is not very well rated – two out of five stars from almost 4,000 reviews, to be precise. Does it work?
Well, a quick search through recent reviews shows that the low score is mainly due to people have general technical issues, few of which are related to the skill itself. Here are a couple of reviews to give you a taste:
constantly get “device offline” when using any music app
Spotify app says its linked, Alexa app says its linked but Alexa keeps telling me to download it and link it!!
Never-the-less, some of the feedback is relevant, which includes the fact that the skill doesn’t allow you to change Spotify accounts – you’re stuck with the one that you connect with, meaning that your young daughter, who likes to play Mr Tumble songs on Alexa, is really going to mess up your music recommendations. To be fair, this isn’t a Spotify-specific problem: most, if not all, the music services have a similar limitation.
Click here to find out how to use an Amazon Echo speakers as computer speakers
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