Whether you pay for Spotify or not, if you have an Amazon Alexa-powered speaker, you can now ask it to play podcasts on Spotify, too. We’ve got just the recommendation.
It’s nice to know that sometimes you don’t need to spend more money in order to get extra features, though more often than not, you can bank on feeling like you’re forced to. For instance, if you buy a smart speaker, you might look for a way to get free music to that speaker, be it through Spotify’s free tier, YouTube Music’s free plan, the Amazon Music equivalent, or through one of the many radio services out there.
However, if you listen to podcasts, it’s usually a little different. Podcasts invariably don’t cost anything, and you can get them from a variety of services, be it Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or even Spotify.
Not all of these will talk to smart speakers, and typically, the directories of podcasts stick to their own. Take Apple Podcasts, because you can get podcasts from it using an Apple device — an iPhone, iPad, a Mac, and so on — or iTunes on a Windows PC, and the HomePod and HomePod Mini will play nicely with them, too. But a Google smart speaker won’t talk to Apple Podcasts, choosing to use Google Podcasts instead.
If you have an Amazon smart speaker, one of the Alexa-enabled models like the 2020 Echo, both Apple’s and Google’s podcasts directories are out of reach. Fortunately, there’s Spotify Podcasts, which is now rolling out support to Amazon Alexa speakers in Australia.
That is to say if you have an Echo speaker or smart display, you can now get the speaker to play nicely with Spotify’s podcast system, allowing you to listen to podcasts such as our very own weekly podcast “The Wrap” on that speaker. It was a feature Spotify provided to Alexa-enabled speakers in the US back in 2019, and at the end of last year, it rolled out to subscribers across Europe, Mexico, Brazil, India, and Canada, with Australia and New Zealand being added now.
It means if you have an Alexa-enabled speaker and a Spotify account, you can get the two talking and playing podcasts easily, and thanks to it running on both paid and free accounts, means you don’t need to be paying for Spotify to make it work. That adds to the free music tier of Spotify Alexa-enabled speakers work with, as well, and mean you may not need to pay for a music service to get music going on a smart speaker. Bonus.
