Daughter and wife aren't happy that Baby Shark is no longer responding to requests on Amazon Music. I'm not happy because they're not happy, and $15/month to play Baby Shark is a bit steep. I just can't justify this added expense.
Background: I was an early Echo adopter and had a bunch of them before competitors started releasing alternatives. Originally, everything was part of a Prime Subscription but then they expanded their services and costs. That being said, I was wondering if there are any other means to play music, in particular via voice search, ideally through Amazon Echos and Alexa.
I realize you can probably sync up Spotify to the Alexa skills, but my understanding is that this requires you to curate your own playlists. So a random request from my 2 year old and wife to play (for example), "Alexa, play Christmas Shark on Spotify" is not going to play the request unless I had the foresight to turn Christmas Shark into its own playlist.
Anyways, wondering what some of you other guys and gals might have figured out.
If it helps. I have two HEOS AVRs, a couple Google Homes, iPads, and a couple Firesticks. Also a Home Assistant installation. But I'm quite honestly completely lost as to any cheap or free workarounds.
It’s been hit or miss today. Seems like the AWS servers in the northeast have been having issues. Could be new customers or lingering effects from the bomb cyclone.
This should actually work fine, same with apple music, you just have to use the Alexa app and link up your account.
Also works fine for Amazon music (just prime, no extra subscription), we used it all day yesterday and today. The only catch I noticed is you can only stream on one device at a time for Amazon unless you get the extra music subscription.
You were lucky. It doesn't always work since they gave "prime" accounts access to the entire library. Sometimes it will play what the kids want. Other times, it picks something else and actually announces something along the line "playing a playlist of similar music".
So you don’t need to create a playlist for Spotify to do this?
I probably should have tested this first. I was a very early beta tester for Spotify when it was starting out in Europe only but swore it off years later due to some policy the founder had. Haven’t used it since but admittedly I did love it,
Also, is the extra music part of Alexa or Spotify? If it’s part of Alexa, I’m wondering if I can register the devices to different members of my household.
My kids use Spotify mostly but in the app you can search and play a single song so should work fine from Alexa. You just need the skill and to link it to your account. Unfortunately the setup Amazon provides is terrible and you can only link one account per Amazon account which is terrible for families. I finally had enough of all the random songs in my Apple Music so I switched Alexa to a family account we setup for a shared iPad. Going to do the same for Spotify.
