I love my Google Home and want to use it with my Spotify account. I know it can be done, I’m hoping you can step me through what’s needed to get Spotify as my default music source on the Google Home unit?
I recently went through the same process – I have a Google Home that sits right next to my television and is my constant musical companion. I love walking into my house and saying “Hey Google! Play Best of the 80’s” and have it understand my voice, know that I’m talking about a playlist and know that the playlist lives on Spotify. Darn useful and enjoyable both!
The better news is that if you have both already set up, it’s quite straightforward to hook ’em up. If you haven’t yet, you will want to get the Home app [Android or iPhone] from Google and the Spotify app [Android or iPhone] on your smartphone or other device. Make sure you’re logged in to both services before we begin (but I bet you’ve already got that set up!)
Now everything happens in the Google Home app, so launch it to start. Here’s what you’ll see (or something very much like it):
You’ll want to tap on the hamburger menu button on the top left. You know, the one with three horizontal lines. That brings up a bunch of setting and preference options:
While the Google Home documentation tells you to go to Settings from here, it’s out of date. In fact, you want to tap on “Music” to proceed. So tap on “Music” here…
You can see that I’m not a YouTube Red subscriber, so the default music service is Google Play Music. It’s good, but not as good as a Spotify account! To add Spotify, I tap on it on this screen.
Note that you do need a Spotify Premium account for this to work, but in my opinion, it’s the best $9.99/mo you can spend, particularly once you get it hooked up to all your devices! We have a family account and my kids are part of the same master account, so it’s even a better deal.
Ready to link accounts? Then tap on … can you guess? …. yes… “LINK ACCOUNT“.
Oops! I forgot to log in to Spotify first. Easily remedied! Once done, I see the prompt I’m hoping to see:
Now a tap on “OKAY” and it’s done. They’re hooked up and you’re ready to go.
Now you can say “Hey Google, play my spotify” and it’ll start working. Or maybe “Hey Google, play counting crows from spotify” if you’re so inclined!
But while we’re here, let’s do one more thing. Let’s change the default music source in Google Home to Spotify. The “Music” screen has now updated because you’ve hooked up Spotify, so it looks like this:
To change the default music source from Google Play Music to Spotify (or Pandora, if you have that too), simply tap on the “Change default” link on the top right of the above screen. Now you’ll see all your music sources and can tap on your desired choice:
That’s all ya gotta do.
Now try “Hey Google, play Kate Bush” and listen to what it says in response. Oh, and enjoy Kate Bush too if you’ve never heard her before! 🙂