Skip to main content

Spotify Now Integrates With Amazon Echo… If You’re A Premium User

Image
By

To the unassuming eye, the Amazon Echo looks like a newfangled stereo speaker, and so it’s no surprise that music is one of the more popular applications for Amazon’s connected, voice-activated, AI device. From today, music on Echo is getting a boost, with a new direct integration between Spotify and Amazon Echo.
“Now playing your favorite music from Spotify is as easy as asking Alexa,” said Toni Reid, Director, Amazon Alexa, in a statement. “Music is one of the most popular features on Amazon Echo, and Spotify has been one of the most requested services, so we’re excited to bring it to our customers today.”

“We’re extremely pleased that Spotify Premium subscribers can now listen to their favorite music on Amazon Echo,” said Ian Geller, Global Head of Hardware at Spotify in a statement. “Creating innovative experiences is core to our mission. We know our users will love controlling music with their voice at home.”Users who are Spotify Premium subscribers, who also have an Amazon Echo, will now be able to command Echo’s virtual assistant Alexa to “play Spotify” and call up their Spotify playlists, as well as artists or genres on the streaming service.
Initially the service will be U.S.-only, where the Amazon Echo is being sold, with no additional details about further rollouts, says a Spotify spokesperson. This has been one of the most-requested additions from Echo customers, and Spotify is a global service, so my guess is that when Amazon does expand the Echo to other markets, the Spotify integration will follow.
Amazon Echo also works with a Spotify Connect integration: Spotify users can select the Echo from their app to switch control from one to the other.
Putting Spotify together with Amazon Echo is an example of mutual marketing in action.
For Amazon Echo, it could drive more sales of the product. There is a natural affinity for using the device to listen to music, and if you’re the kind of consumer who is investing in an Echo there is a strong chance you also stream digital music, too.
Amazon Echo is already integrated with several other streaming services — Amazon Music, Prime Music, iHeartRadio, Pandora, and TuneIn. But Spotify is the market leader globally, with 100 million users and just over 28 million of those paying. Having the ability to play Spotify on the device could be the tipping point for yet more Echo purchases, or at least to help give it more mainstream appeal.
This also fits in with the wider strategy Amazon has been applying to Echo. As with its Kindle tablets and e-readers and other hardware, Amazon has not revealed any sales figures for its $180 Echo devices to date. But it has been aggressively adding more integrations to improve the device’s usefulness — and presumably help feed the machine-learning algorithms that run Alexa and potentially its many other services.
These have included very essential actions like the ability to order pizza, as well as create shopping and other to-do lists, access news and other information, set alarms and more.
For Spotify, the fact that Echo streaming is a Premium feature is interesting: it essentially gives consumers who pay for the Premium tier another benefit for doing so. If you are already an Echo owner, the fact that you can stream Spotify over the device could become the reason you decide to finally switch from being a free Spotify user to one who pays.
Today, Spotify’s Premium tier, which costs $9.99 per month, gives users ad-free listening, higher audio quality, offline playback and other features.
And this also fits into a wider Spotify strategy, too: the company may be the biggest streaming music provider today in terms of active users, but it’s facing a lot of heavy competition from the likes of Apple and Google as well as other pure-play streaming companies like Deezer — which, incidentally, today made its own hardware inroads in a new deal with Huawei for its service to be embedded on its new Honor handsets.
But streaming music is, in a way, a commodity, with precious little differentiation in terms of basic catalogs. So, one way that Spotify can make sure its users stay loyal, or migrate, to its service above the others is by the services it builds around the catalog — be it in the form of playlists, or exclusive features, or simple convenience factor.
In that vein, a level of ubiquity across popular hardware is a must.

Comments

  1. LilyNovember 23, 2019 at 11:53 AM

    Just love your article.I do invariably look over your web site for brand new articles.I am recently performing on associate app how to get premium spotify apk
    thats going awing and special because of you

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How ad-free subscriptions could solve Facebook

By
At the core of Facebook’s “well-being” problem is that its business is directly coupled with total time spent on its apps. The more hours you pass on the social network, the more ads you see and click, the more money it earns. That puts its plan to make using Facebook healthier at odds with its finances, restricting how far it’s willing to go to protect us from the harms of over use. The advertising-supported model comes with some big benefits, though. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that “We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.” Ads lets Facebook remain free for those who don’t want to pay, and more importantly, for those around the world who couldn’t afford to. Ads pay for Facebook to keep the lights on, research and develop new technologies, and profit handsomely in a way that attracts top talent and further investment. More affluent users with more buying power in markets like the US, UK, and Canada command higher ad prices, effectively...
1 comment
Read more

Anyline Raises €1.5M To Let You Add Optical Character Recognition To Your App

By
Anyline , the Austrian startup that provides mobile OCR tech to enable developers to add text recognition to their own apps, has raised €1.5 million in funding. The list of investors is interesting, too. It includes angel investor Johann ‘Hansi’ Hansmann, busuu co-founder Bernhard Niesner, Lukas Püspök, and the U.S.-based VC-fund iSeed Ventures. However, most notable is that the round was led by Gernot Langes-Swarovski Group. As one investor put it to me, “the fact that the Swarovski family led the round shows that finally ‘old’ money is moving into Austrian startups”. Offering its own mobile Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology — which uses a smartphone’s camera to accurately scan and recognise any kind of text, code or number — Anyline co-founder and CEO Lukas Kinigadner tells me the startup is built on the premise that “people screw up a lot”. “Mistakes happen easily when you’re writing down a 10-digit-number and then have to type it in again a few moments later...
Post a Comment
Read more

India’s Nexus Venture Partners Announces New $450M Fund

By
Nexus Venture Partners  — the top-tier Indian VC firm which counts  Snapdeal , Etsy-like Craftsvilla and medtech startup Lybrate in its portfolio — has reloaded for more deals after it announced its newest $450 million fund. The fund, which is the nine-year-old firm’s fourth to date, takes it to over $1 billion in capital under management — becoming the first Indian VC to reach that milestone. Nexus, which has invested in more than 60 companies to date, said the capital will be used for seed and early-stage deals once again. In particular, the firm is looking closely at retail, financial services, health and education in the consumer space, in addition to promising companies in the enterprise space. Nexus’ previous fund — its third — closed at $270 million in 2012, but now it has ramped up in line with increased interest and activity in India’s startup space. “We are thankful to our investors that continue to ba...
Post a Comment
Read more

Apple Opens Up 'iWork for iCloud' to Everyone, No Apple Device Required

By
Apple's  iCloud.com  website has been updated to make its iWork suite of apps  accessible to all users , even those without an Apple device.  As of today, anyone can sign up for an Apple ID to access  Pages ,  Numbers , and Keynote  for free. The software suite lets users create and edit text documents, presentations, and spreadsheets from their browsers. Signing up for a free Apple ID account entitles users to 1GB of complimentary iCloud storage to be used with the apps for storing documents.  Previously, access to Apple's iWork suite of apps was limited to users who owned an iOS device or a Mac, but with Apple's new web-only iCloud access, the company can draw new users to its platform and compete with more universal software offerings like Microsoft's Office Suite.  iCloud.com's -only apps can be accessed from recent versions of Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer. Free accounts are limited to 1GB of storage and users will need...
Post a Comment
Read more

This BB-8 Is Made Entirely Of LEGO Parts And Actually Rolls Like BB-8 Should

By
Ready for your semi-regular reminder that some people are just way,  way  too clever? These folks managed to make a BB-8 model…. completely out of LEGO parts. And it actually rolls. And its head actually stays in place on top, as BB-8’s head should. One key bit here is that its creators only claim that it’s made of 100% genuine LEGO parts , not 100% LEGO  blocks . Since a fistful of rectangular Lego blocks generally won’t roll too well, the builders repurposed an already-round Tatooine model from a long-retired Star Wars podracing set. Add some a bunch of parts, magnets, and wheels all stripped from other kits, and this surprisingly functional BB-8 comes together. They even built a little basestation for BB-8 to sit on, allowing it to roll in place when you crank a wheel. Jealous? Want one of your own? Good news! The creators have  a project page  up for it on Lego IDEAS, where LEGO commits to looking into any projects that hits 10,000 support...
Post a Comment
Read more