You can now have your Amazon Echo default to Spotify as your music library or Pandora as your station service instead of Prime Music for either.
You might like Amazon’s Echo, and even Amazon Prime, but that doesn’t mean that you’re a fan of all of Amazon’s services. Perhaps you’ve been a big Spotify or Pandora supporter for years and you don’t need to use any other streaming music service at the moment—not even Amazon Prime Music. That, or maybe you just don’t have any audio files to upload to Amazon’s service, or you don’t like Amazon’s cap of 250 songs for an uploaded library (250,000, if you pay an extra $25 annually).
If you’ve been using Amazon’s Echo, you’ve been stuck with a fun little quirk whereby asking Alexa to play you a song makes your digital assistant try to pull up the track on Amazon Prime Music. You can always append a phrase like “on Spotify” to the end of your query, but if you forget, Alexa is going to look on Amazon’s service, not other services.
However, a new tweak to the Amazon Echo now allows owners to specify whether Amazon Prime Music should be the Echo’s default option for streaming music or whether Alexa should query Spotify or Pandora instead. Yes, the move spares you all of two words you have to tell Alexa, but it’s a welcome relief for those who use their Echo devices for a lot of streaming.
To make the switch, just pull up the Echo’s web-based configuration site or accompanying iOS or Android app. Navigate to the Settings menu, and find the “Music & Media” section. Once there, look for the new “Choose default music services” option, which is what you’ll use to change your default music library and default station service from Amazon Music to Spotify or Pandora. (You can only use Spotify as your default library, not your default station service; Pandora can only be your default station service, not your default library.)
We don’t know if Amazon will support any other streaming services in the near future, but its move is at least one minor way to make Echo a bit more open for those who don’t use all of Amazon’s services. And it’s not Amazon’s first push toward more Echo openness.
Recently, the company tweaked the Echo’s skills aspect a bit to allow users to automatically download anything simply by telling Alexa to “Alexa, enable [skill name].” Amazon also changed up how it shows these third-party skills within its Alexa app by dropping them into categories, adding in a stronger search feature, and allowing users to sort by more criteria when they’re looking for cool new skills to use.
