Skip to main content

I’ve got a bunch of Sonos speakers in my house that I love, tied to a paid Amazon Music subscription. In the last couple months Alexa has started to mix up music requests. 
 

If I say something like “Alexa, play songs by The Beatles,” the system will play one song by the Beatles, then a piece of classical music, then another song by the Beatles, then a song by Billy Joel and so on. Sometimes it doesn’t even play a song by the Beatles to begin with: it’ll just play something that seems vaguely related, like Bob Dylan. 
 

It’s as if I’ve got an invisible music queue somewhere that’s getting new requests mashed in among the old ones whenever I ask Alexa to play something. When Alexa is playing music, though, the queue in my Sonos app isn’t available. I’ve tried clearing my Sonos queue when Alexa isn’t playing, and that doesn’t seem to help. 
 

Any ideas? Connectivity is good, and every other feature of the system is working as expected. 

You say you have a subscription, but is that to Amazon Prime or to Amazon Music Unlimited?  It sounds like it is behaving as i would expect for a Prime subscription.

https://support.sonos.com/s/article/3248?language=en_US

Thanks @John B. I do have Amazon Music Unlimited. That thought crossed my mind—it’s kind of behaving like an unpaid service similar to Pandora, where you can’t request specific songs or artists, and you just get similar music. I should be able to request specific music through my paid subscription, though, and this seemed to work until a couple months ago. 

Thanks @John B. I do have Amazon Music Unlimited. That thought crossed my mind—it’s kind of behaving like an unpaid service similar to Pandora, where you can’t request specific songs or artists, and you just get similar music. I should be able to request specific music through my paid subscription, though, and this seemed to work until a couple months ago. 

 

I’ve noticed that voice requests for music don’t work as well as they used to either.  It’s not an issue with Sonos, as it’s Amazon’s logic that determines which music to play.   And I get the same results whether I talk to a Sonos speaker or an Echo.

I just get the impression that Amazon is trying out new logic or machine learning or something.  That would fine, if I cared to give better feedback to Amazon or had any sort of predictable pattern in what sort of music I listen to.

Terms & ConditionsCookie settings