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Spotify’s free tier now works on Sonos, just in time for Black Friday

Simon Cohen
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Starting on November 12, a new software release will give Sonos users the ability to stream Spotify music for free without needing a Premium subscription. Until now, the only way to add Spotify as a music service within the Sonos app was to have a paid monthly Premium account. The move comes ahead of the big Black Friday and Cyber Monday retail events that have traditionally driven a lot of sales for electronics companies like Sonos.

With an ad-supported free Spotify account and a Sonos system, you can:

  • Access Spotify’s entire catalog on shuffle
  • Access 15 personalized on-demand playlists, including Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and Daily Mix, as well as favorites like RapCaviar, Viva Latino, and more
  • Stream Spotify Free through the Sonos app or directly from the Spotify app
  • Start playlists with your voice based on title, genre, or mood with the Google Assistant on a voice-enabled device.

Even though you can control Sonos itself through either Amazon’s Alexa or the Google Assistant, music service integration is handled differently by each voice assistant. Because Spotify’s free tier isn’t supported by Amazon Alexa on any of the company’s Echo devices, it won’t work on Sonos either. Digital Trends was told that Sonos will look at adding the ad-supported tier of Spotify to Sonos’ Alexa integration as soon as Amazon itself supports it.

Related

Sonos is also using this news as a way to announce its Black Friday deals. The holiday season is one of the few occasions during the year that the company discounts its products. This year, the deals focus exclusively on Sonos’ home theater components.

The deals start at midnight ET on November 28, and are valid until December 2.

As a reminder, this isn’t the only way to save money on new Sonos products: The company recently introduced a recycling program that gives owners of specific older Sonos products the ability to declare them “recycled” in exchange for a one-time 30% discount on any new Sonos component. Once you register your old Sonos device with the recycling program, you’ll have 21 days to keep using it and then it will enter a recycle mode, which effectively kills the device, making it completely inoperable. You can send the old unit back to Sonos, or recycle it yourself if local facilities exist.

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Simon Cohen
Simon Cohen
Contributing Editor, A/V
Simon Cohen covers a variety of consumer technologies, but has a special interest in audio and video products, like spatial…
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