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

Five budget-friendly open source storage servers

By
Storage is essential for the enterprise: Data must be stored. Data must be retrieved. Data must be shared. Data must be secured. At the same time, storage must not consume the entirety of your IT budget. Fortunately, you can find effective solutions in the world of open source. Outside of cost effectiveness, one of the biggest benefits of these solutions is the ability to modify them to perfectly fit your needs. You can make minor changes or even roll your own storage solution based on one of these tools. If you want enterprise support and a "solution in a can" that will meet just about any enterprise storage need, you should turn to Red Hat or SUSE. Both Linux-based companies offer some of the most powerful enterprise-ready tools on the market. But if you'd rather get your hands dirty and craft something of your own—something that won't demolish your budget—these five open source tools are a great place to start. 1: ownCloud ownCloud ( Figure ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Google Announces “Purchases On Google” For Buying Straight From PLAs And Other Mobile Shopping Updates

By
The much-anticipated buy button in Google search ads is finally here. Called Purchases On Google, it turns out the new feature isn’t a button at all. “Buy on Google” messaging will appear in eligible product listing ads on both iOS and Android smartphones. Purchases on Google is launching in a very limited pilot with select retailers. When consumers click on Purchases On Google-enabled ads, they’ll be taken to a page hosted by Google where they can make a purchase using payment criteria stored with Google. The orders are then passed through to the retailer for fulfillment and any customer service follow up. Check out our full coverage  where you’ll find many more details about Purchases On Google on our sister site Marketing Land. Google also announced several of other updates to mobile PLAs: New Mobile Shopping Ad Formats For Voice Search When consumers use voice search to find products, Google is starting to show...
Post a Comment
Read more

Iron Man Galaxy S6 Edge Arrives With An Arc Reactor Charger

By
Samsung’s  Iron Man-branded Galaxy S6 Edge  arrives tomorrow, with a custom paint job, 64GB of on-board storage and a limited edition wireless charger accessory with an appropriate arc reactor graphic included on top. It ships with a clear cover, too, so you can protect your precious “armor” when ticketing around in the real world. The box it comes in is also red and gold, and there’s a big ol’ Iron Man helmet stencil graphic on the back of the device, too, as well as a software theme to match. I probably would’ve left off the face personally, letting the colors speak for themselves, but this was a partnership with Marvel with the intent of promoting the new Avengers film oversees, so they probably could’ve been a lot less tasteful with the branding overall. The sad news for those of you who were hoping to advertise their Stark fandom on their phones is that availability is listed as only Korea as of tomorrow, with sales beginning in China and Hong Kong...
Post a Comment
Read more

Visa confirms Coinbase wasn’t at fault for overcharging users

By
Yesterday, we wrote that Coinbase customers were being charged multiple times for past transactions. While some speculated that the erroneous withdraws were down to a Coinbase engineering issue, Coinbase issued a statement saying it wasn’t liable for the duplicate charges. The blame, instead, rested with Visa for the way it handled a migration of merchant categories for cryptocurrencies, Coinbase said. While you can read my post yesterday for an in-depth description of what happened, the basic gist is that Visa refunded and recharged (under a different merchant category) a month of old transactions. Many users saw the recharge come through before the refund processed, making it look like they were double charged. Honestly, the issue was likely exacerbated by existing payment rails — it’s normal for refunds to take multiple days to show up on credit and debit statements. But here’s where it gets weird — this morning Visa issued a statement to some publications shifting the blam...
Post a Comment
Read more

Trump cites Facebook exec’s comments downplaying Russian ad influence on election

By
You’d be forgiven for missing Donald Trump’s multiple retweets of Facebook executive Rob Goldman over the weekend. Perhaps you were spending time with family, watching Black Panther or just attempting to forget politics for a moment by ignoring the manic flurry of social media updates from the leader of the free world. But in amongst a deluge of tweets that blamed Democrats for failing to preserve DACA, called out the FBI over the recent school shooting in Florida on the FBI and affectionately referred to a member of congress as “Liddle’ Adam Schiff, the leakin’ monster of no control,” the President cited Facebook’s VP of Ads as evidence against claims that his campaign colluded with Russia. “The Fake News Media never fails,” Trump tweeted over the weekend. “Hard to ignore this fact from the Vice President of Facebook Ads, Rob Goldman!” Trump was citing Goldman’s own Twitter dump over the past week, responding to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s recent indictment of 13 Russian...
Post a Comment
Read more