iPhone Hijacked by Amazon Echo

[bdavolley]

I have one spotify account that is connected to my macbook air, iphone 6+, and Amazon Echo. The problem is, when I am listening on my phone outside of the house, someone in my family can go to the Echo and ask it to play something on Spotify and it will automatically switch from my phone to the Echo. Then we get into a tug of war. Is there any solution to this? If it is playing on one platform I don't want it to be hijacked and played on another. Is that possible? Thanks!

[Hubo · Accepted solution]

Hey bdavolley! Welcome to the community!

Unfortunately, Spotify only allows one stream at a time per user. However, you can upgrade your subscription to Spotify Family and everyone can get their own account and can listen to music simultaneously. You can read more about Spotify Family on this page.

Have a nice day! 🙂

[bdavolley]

Thanks for the reply. I don’t mind only having one stream at a time. What I do mind is that someone can come in and hijack that stream from someone else. For instance, I can be on a road trip listening to my favorite road jams and then, all of the sudden…POOF…they’re gone. Or, my wife can be in the middle of her workout and on the homestretch, someone will take it over. I would just like it to stick with the original stream. Is the only workaround the family plan?

[Hubo]

Spotify will pause the first stream and then continue to play the latest 'request'. There's not much you can do about it. You can create a seperate account for Amazon Echo or logout on Amazon Echo.

I'm sorry. Have a nice day.

[bdavolley]

Ok. Thanks for your help!

[bionicrocky]

I have a Family Account.  My son's Spotify is associated with the Echo.  We have this same issue.  If one of us is on the Echo and one is on a phone, they will change each other's music.

[leslieannsf]

This IS NOT A SOLUTION

and it bothers me that you do not think it is a problem and you refuse to do anything about it

[dave-sf]

I'm trying spotify family for the first time, and honestly this spotify connect feature is making spotify totally useless, and I don't think I'll be continuing my subscription.

The problem is, if I want to have all my playlists available on alexa, then I have to use the same account (because spotify playlist sharing is clunky and has to be done one by one). However, if I use the same account, then when my kids ask alexa to play a song, it not only hijacks my desktop and mobile players, it also turns them into remote controls playing sound to the alexa. Of course I can create a separate account for the alexa under the family plan, but then I can't access my playlists. Totally useless.

I was interested in a music solution that was platform agnostic (amazon, google, ios), but it looks like I'll be going back to using amazon music.

[Eccohawk]

Other companies address this by setting up family members as profiles within a single account. Each user gets their own profile, playlists, likes, friends, recommendations, etc. And the overall account acts as a single-sign-on for each device. Then, when setting up the integration with the Echo, it would assume playback from a ‘default’ profile for unqualified requests, and still allow for visibility into individual profile data for more personalized invocations such as ‘Alexa, play Brian’s rock and roll playlist’ - which searches for the playlist named ‘Rock and Roll’ under Brian’s profile in the family account. It could even be further improved with a bit of additional coding on the Alexa skill to recognize the caller’s voice profile and link it automagically to their Spotify profile so that when Brian asks Alexa for ‘my rock and roll playlist’ it knows where to look.

On the mobile side, you can automatically set it to a specific Spotify profile and that way the odds are extremely low that calls to Brian’s profile data get submitted to Alexa while he’s out and about.