Apple Music is finally coming to Amazon Echo
Apple Music is coming to Amazon’s Echo smart speakers with Alexa. Finally!
Amazon and Apple will make the streaming service available to current Apple Music subscribers or potential customers starting the week of Dec. 17.
As a subscriber to Apple Music, you always had workarounds for streaming Apple’s service through an Echo, notably by pairing your phone or tablet via Bluetooth to the speaker.
What you couldn’t do, though, was ask Alexa to play the specific music you were in the mood to hear, and you were pretty much limited to volume and play controls.
The agreement between Apple and Amazon will now let you exploit Alexa with Apple Music to its fullest: “Alexa, play Bruce Springsteen,” “Alexa, play Beats 1 radio,” “Alexa, play my chill playlist,” or for that matter have Alexa play any of the 50 million tracks that fill the Apple Music catalog.
“Given the size and scope of Apple Music, it’s been one of the most askedfor features for the past three or four years since we’ve had Echo and Alexa out there,” says Dave Limp, Amazon .com senior vice president for devices & services.
Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president for Internet software and services, says the engineers have been at it for about six months.
The news comes just less than a year after the Amazon Prime Video app was made available on Apple TV.
For Apple, reserving a spot inside the Echo will help it in its fierce battle against global streaming champ Spotify. The Swedish company recently revealed that it had reached 87 million paid subscribers.
By comparison, as of the end of July when it last spilled the beans, Apple said it had more than 50 million listeners, which included paid customers and those on a three-month trial.
Amazon, which has its own ambitions through Amazon Music, will only say generally that, as of August, it had “tens of millions of paid customers” and that the number of hours streamed globally on Amazon Music with Alexaenabled devices more than doubled what it was during the same period a year earlier.
There’s no special rate for trying Apple Music on the Echo. You get three months free, same as elsewhere, after which you’ll pay $9.99 a month for an individual subscription, $4.99 as a student, or $14.99 for a family plan that covers up to six people.
From the Amazon Alexa app on your phone, you can select Apple Music and link the account to an Echo, just as you might do via the app with Spotify or other streaming options. If you choose to make Apple Music the default music service, Alexa will play the song, artist or playlist of your choice upon request, without your having to direct Alexa specifically to Apple Music. If Apple Music is not the default, you’d have to say, “Alexa play X on Apple Music.”
If you have an Echo Show or Echo Spot, Amazon’s Alexa speakers with screen, you’ll see cover art when you play a song through Apple Music. What you won’t see are song lyrics, a feature Amazon has for certain Amazon Music tracks on these devices.
While Apple Music is coming to the Amazon Echo, for now anyway, the arrangement isn’t reciprocal, so that Amazon Music service will not be made available on Apple’s Siri-controlled HomePod speaker. (You will be able to stream Amazon Music to the HomePod through AirPlay.)
From a privacy perspective, once you enable Apple Music on your Alexa app, what will be shared with Amazon are the names of the playlists in your library. If you disconnect your Apple Music account from Alexa, Amazon will delete those playlist names within 90 days.
“That’s the only piece of data that Amazon is storing about you related to this,” Cue says. “This is done in a privacy-friendly way we’re very pleased with and wouldn’t have done it otherwise.”