Amazon this morning announced a new feature for its Echo devices called “multi-room music,” which allows owners with more than one Echo to control where their music is played, or even sync it across a group of Echo devices using voice commands. For example, you’ll be able to tell Alexa to play your music in the living room, play music upstairs or downstairs, or even just play your music everywhere.
Beyond just saying “play my music,” followed by a location, you can also ask Alexa to play your favorite artist, or use other music-related commands, as you would normally.
The feature, at launch, works across some – but not all – of the music services supported by Echo. Naturally, it supports Amazon’s own music service (which also just slashed[1] its student pricing today), as well as TuneIn, iHeartRadio and Pandora. The company says that support for Spotify and Sirius XM is coming soon, but didn’t provide an exact timeframe.
Echo devices, Echo Dot and Echo Show smart speaker systems will support multi-room music in the U.S., U.K., and Germany, starting today.
The ability to synchronize your music across your home could make Echo devices a poor-man’s alternative to pricier home audio and speaker systems. While Amazon’s speakers aren’t necessarily known today for having the best sound quality – it’s Alexa that’s really selling them – rumor has it that Amazon is working on a high-end speaker[2] to compete with Apple’s forthcoming HomePod.
Adding multi-room music support ahead of an updated, better quality Echo device makes sense as gives time for Amazon to get its software working, as well as put tools into the hands of other device makers that will allow their own speaker systems to...