Exclusive: Apple Music is coming to Amazon Echo speakers week of Dec. 17 - USA TODAY

USA TODAY

Published 6:00 AM EST Nov 30, 2018

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.

More: Spotify vs. Apple Music vs. YouTube Music: Which is best for your hard-earned cash?

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 asked for 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.

Apple’s senior vice president for Internet software and services, Eddy Cue, says the engineers have been at it for about six months.

The news comes just under 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 fierce battle against the 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 Alexa-enabled 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 — or Apple’s Beats 1 radio, for that matter — 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.

All the tech giants want a piece, make that a chunk, of you — meaning they want you in their respective ecosystems. But Limp says that, “a customer’s home is not homogeneous, and to think of it in that respect would not be prudent…From the very beginning, Amazon has rested one of our core tenets on customer selection. We sell a lot of Apple products and are very happy to do so….The fact that you can have certain products and services work with each other and at other times have products that compete or overlap is fine. This isn’t a winner-take-all environment.”

Apple’s Cue concurs: “One of the things we’ve always believed with music — and this goes back to the iTunes days — is to try to make the music services as widely available as possible. We started by making it available on Windows, and you remember when hell froze over. We’ve had it available on Sonos devices (and) Android devices. We love the ability of people who have Echos to be able to listen and have the full experience of Apple Music on their devices.”

Still, 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.)

Cue added, as an aside, that last week, HomePod had its best week since its February launch.

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.”

Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter

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