Home streaming services and the "family premium account"

[TehWardy]

Plan

Premium

Country

 England

Device

Various

Operating System

Various

My Question or Issue

 So when i setup the amazon echo in my living room I also setup "amazon family", that allowed me to link my other halfs account and my account to the same device through the "home account" which I guess is a thing they setup behind the scenes to link it all.

I then linked my Spotify account to my aamazon echo and this is where the problems began.

1. I first had to sign up for a premium account (not advertised anywhere as required so I was annoyed as I didn't mind the ads and was happy with the free account)
2. I then found that I couldn't find a "nice way" to link information / the usage of spotify in the home to the multiple spotify accounts we have.
3. I then upgraded my account to the "premium family account" thinking this would solve the problem and it seems to just take my account as a premium and "bolt on my other halfs account with premium" whilst not really solving my problem of streaming media at home.

My current problem is this ...

I have a premium family subscription account and would like to have a means to define a "shared set of playlists" that are played on the home echo / other devices when asking alexa to play "my media". 

Right now doing that forces my account to be linked to that device meaning that despite my other half also having premium services she has no means (short of unlinking and re-linking the echo <=> spotify all the time) to play music when i'm at work because if she does I can't play my music at my desk.

Is it not possible that when "enabling" a spotify premium family account that the account have some sort of shared space that home devices consume and that both accounts can access independently?

[JulianA_Bogota]

Hey @TehWardy, welcome to the Spotify Community!

Thanks for letting us know about this. Since all Spotify accounts are made for personal use only, you won't be able to stream music in two places at the same time with one account. Since you're letting us know that you and your partner share a Premium for Family plan, we're happy to know that you'll both get all the benefits and features Spotify has to offer.

According to the info you're sharing with us, our best recommendation would be for you to create a collaborative playlist. This way, you'll be able to stream the music each one of you likes from the same playlist, from both of your accounts.

Regarding the Amazon Echo you have set up at home, we'd like to suggest that you reach out to their help center in order to know whether or not you're able to link more than one Spotify account to your device. If not, we're afraid that you'll have to link unlink your Spotify accounts when either of you wants to stream music from there.

We hope this helps. Have an amazing day 🙂

[TehWardy]

Alexa already has support for "amazon home" which is a means to link multiple amazon  accounts to the device, it's a shame spotify can't understand this trivial case and follow along or understand that situations like alexa is only a single speaker device and can be grouped with others in the home by streaming to all alexa devices in my home you're saying that's also somehow a breach of some ficticious license agreement idea you have about what constitutes "single use" for a user.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Connect-Access-to-family-accounts-on-Alexa/idi-p/1482184

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Closed-Ideas/Listen-to-multiple-accounts-Family-Plan-on-Alexa/idi-p...

... I give up trying to be helpful.

Might as well save my money and cancel the sub like the 7 pages of comments I just read on that last one.

If anyone else wants to get involved in an open source community project to download the music to local library then have alexa talk to that get in touch, i'll be on discord ...

https://discord.gg/6tuJqhq

[polimeni]

I switched my account from Family to Personal (now my wife doesn't have it) but I still have the same problem.   What is wrong and how can I fix it?  Amazon doesn't have help as friendly as yours and I can't seem to get an answer other than "upgrade to spotify premium" (which I have already done and it is now active - I checked).

[TehWardy]

So I found out if you have the family services stuff setup with Amazon and
you link your account to Alexa you can literally just say "Alexa switch
accounts" to switch through the accounts you have linked to your Amazon
home.

For each Amazon account you have you can also have a Spotify account and
you can setup the link for each account individually.

In short getting Spotify to work with multiple accounts is impossible but
Amazon allows us to link multiple accounts to the device then effortlessly
switch between them.

A simple follow up call to "play my music" tells Alexa to issue the my
music call to the currently set account based on linking.

That likely makes no sense ... It's a bit confusing and needs a guide
really but Spotify won't own this and I found it by digging through
developer resources and asking questions to some of my Amazon expert
coppeagues.