Premium Family and Alexa

[Marleenvd]

Plan

Free/Premium

Country

Belgium

Device

Sonos, Echo Dot

My Question or Issue

I have a Spotify Premium Family account. So we should be able to play each on different devices different music. This does not work. It stops playing when another song is activated on another device.  And also a second question : All the Alexa devices have the same Alexa account ( so they are connected ) , but can I use 1 Alexa device for 1 family member, and another device for another family member? 

[AxMstrLP]

Not being able to assign Spotify Family users to individual Echo devices is unacceptable as it breaks several other aspects of the Alexa/SmartHome functionality.  For example, if I have smart lightbulbs in my kid's room so she can tell her dot, "Echo, Lights on" then, if she puts her dot on her own account simply to use her own Spotify, then she can no longer control her lights.  Furthermore, as a parent, I lose parental controls over her device if she makes her own Amazon account simply to use her Spotify account.  It also breaks other Echo functionality like, "Alexa, make an announcement". 

Conversely, using one of the 5 Spotify family accounts across all devices undermines the ability for everyone to listen to their own music simultaneously -- which is why I'm paying a premium in the first place.

When can we expect a fix?

[SuperPeca]

Because Spotify doesn't care about families, we are not their target demographics. They are rolling out a kids' app in a few countries but still, they would need to cast from a tablet, they can't use a voice command to start the music. So they are not tackling the issue directly but making you start a stream through a device, not by voice. That's very sad - that a company like Spotify stays in the past and ignores the huge market of smart speakers and voice activation (not to mention the lack of hi-res, they are still streaming MP3s like its the 90s). This is why I will stay with Amazon music family HD where I can run 6 different streams on any device from one account, use my voice to do that and enjoy CD-quality music or better. in their defense, it's not just about Amazon, none of the smart speaker ecosystems are supported (Google, Apple, etc.) so at least they are consistent in their mistakes...

[FrankAllensbach]

Hi Help-Team,

I followed your link, but did not get to a solution.

My setup:

Spotify Premium Family with two users: Me and my wife

Spotify is used on our Iphones

Sonos 5 in living room

Echo in our son's room

Echo dot in kitchen

Spotify does work in parallel on the Iphones. However, if we switch to the speakers, they disturb each other. Most annoying: I listen to Spotify in the car, my wife asks Alexa to play song X, then my stream stopps and displays the message that I now use the Echo.

I have set up the Echos from scratch today, following exactly the instructions, but somehow it still does not work. I am also wondering, why not more users have this issue.

Thanks for your help,

Frank

[Paddylryan]

This is not an acceptable or a workable solution. You guys should be embarrassed. How is it possible that your “engineers” cannot figure out an acceptable solution when Apple has figured it out. Stop being lazy and start listening to your subscribers. I downgraded my Spotify account to the free version today, after being a premium member since 2015. I left your service for Amazon Music Unlimited - which is fully compatible with my smart home. I also sold my investment in your stock after finding out how ridiculously bad your smart home compatibility is regarding the family plan. Good luck not loosing more customers!

[Elena]

Hey there folks,

Thank you for your replies. We're sorry to hear you feel like this and we appreciate your feedback on this.

We're always testing things by adding or removing features to make Spotify better overall. 

There's actually an idea about this. You can leave a +Vote and subscribe to the thread for any updates.

We're constantly aiming to improve our features so we hope you’ll continue using it and find it gets better in the future. 

Once again - thanks for the feedback. Let us know if we can help with anything else. We're always one reply away.
 

Cheers!

[ssrobinson16]

Is it possible to link your alexa to your actual family account instead of just one person??? I don't even care about not being able to listen all at once, I'm most annoyed by the fact that I upgraded to the family plan so that my daughter could have her own playlists that wouldn't affect my spotify mixes etc. but now when we ask it to play hers it says it doesn't recognize the names of her playlists because its under my account (even though I'm the manager of the family plan) 

This really shouldn't be so complicated!!

[1212434747]

Hi Peter - This solution doesn't work for people (like me) who have young children and do not want them to have their own Amazon accounts, but do want them to be able to play from their own Spotify Family accounts, to which we subscribe. Surely there has to be a solution short of creating new Amazon accounts for minors? 

[thedemetrious]

Although Elena says there is an 'idea' under consideration for this problem - when you follow the link you can see this was logged in Oct 2016 and last updated June 2018.

Elena, Peter...or anyone else connected with Spotify following this thread - PLEASE can we have an update about whether you are intending to do anything about this or not...please!

[der_schneewolf]

Yeah, Spotify decided (according to the status of this idea) a "not right now".
Okay, so you take our money, and then you wont let us stream the music we paid for? Wow ...
Said to leave, as Spotify is a European company, but if Amazon is able to perform what we want to do, we're going to switch to them.

[shinybr3nda]

this this this~!! if there are 3 people in your family subscription, just let us play on three devices at once thanks.

[slowgintrout]

Hi Peter,

Question for you. My son is 5 and isn't old enough to have a Spotify user name and password but he does have a kid's account under our premium family plan. Is there a way for us to sign him in using his kid's account on his alexa echo speaker so he doesn't take over our spotify every time he wants to listen to music in his room? I would need a way to link a kid's account, so would need a user name or email and password. Would typing in his user name and my password work since he doesn't have an email address? Thanks!

Gunnar

[CarlosE]

Hey there @slowgintrout,

Thanks for reaching out to the Community.

We're afraid that right now our Kids app doesn't have an integration with Alexa, so it isn't possible to link a Kids account to an Alexa device.

We appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback and we can see how that can be a handy feature. We recommend adding your +Vote on this idea that supports the idea to launch the Kids app for Amazon speakers.

You can read more about how feedback on ideas reaches Spotify here.

We'll be here if you need anything else.

Have a good one!

[shinybr3nda]

i gave up (because it's not possible) and gave the kids adult accounts. Naff solution but the only one.