One of the best uses for a smart speaker is as an on-demand jukebox. Amazon’s Echo devices integrate directly with both Spotify and Amazon’s own online music service, each of which offers a library of more than 100 million tracks. So you should be able to find almost everything you want.
There are downsides to this arrangement, however. One is that you need to pay a subscription to get the best from these music services. On both Spotify and Amazon Music, free users can only request playlists, rather than specific songs; Amazon Prime subscribers can stream individual tracks from Amazon Music, but the service limits the number of times you can skip every hour, and insists on shuffling albums and playlists. For full control you need to pay £9.99 a month for a full Spotify account, or £10.99 a month for Amazon Music Unlimited.
Another catch is that, as we said, you can find almost everything you want on these services. But what about those rare bootlegs and B-sides that you’ve been painstakingly collecting? Or recordings of your friends’ bands, and your own mixes? Curating your own music library is unfashionable these days, but it’s the best way to keep full control of your music, with all the tracks you want to listen to and no recurring payments.
The good news is that it’s perfectly possible to get Alexa to stream your own music: you simply
