Alexa Playing Music Through Spotify Connect In Wrong House!


I've come across a strange situation this weekend where my parents at their home asking Alexa to play on 'living room' is starting the music on the sonos speakers called 'living room' in my house, 10 miles away on a different network!

We are using different sonos accounts and different spotify accounts, and it only seems to work one way, I cant control theirs.

We were able to do this repeatably even after using and controlling my sonos speakers from other apps.

Seems to be a serious bug / privacy breach going on here. Anyone else come across this and found a fix?

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17 replies

Do they have Alexa registered to their own Amazon account or are both residences using the same one? Did this just start or has it been an issue since they got their device?
They are using their own Amazon account now, but I did buy it for them and had to de-register it from my account initially, so that might point to a cause. I've checked and it's definitely not registered to my account any more.
I would start there. Reset it to factory and go through the entire setup again. Remove the apps from their devices also and reinstall them. Reboot the phone after removing them.
In terms of when the problem started, their Sonos and Echo devices are only a few months old, but the problem only seemed to begin this weekend, although they have just changed the names of their rooms to match what mine are called, so hadn't asked it to play on Living Room before this weekend.
This is a feature of ALL Spotify Connect enabled speakers. The way to break the link is to play something else on the speakers. This is a known Spotify Connect 'feature', has nothing to do with Alexa and is not a Sonos issue.
This is a feature of ALL Spotify Connect enabled speakers. The way to break the link is to play something else on the speakers. This is a known Spotify Connect 'feature', has nothing to do with Alexa and is not a Sonos issue. Hi John, I'd read that elsewhere already, but as I said in my post the problem is repeatable after playing multiple other things through my speakers from numerous sources.
When a visitor is allowed onto a wifi network and plays from Spotify using the Spotify app, a connection is made between the device (specifically the Spotify app and the Sonos speaker (Sonos in this case, but it could be any Spotify Connect enabled speaker). The connection is made in the cloud, and so persists independently of the wifi network that allowed the initial connection.
Sorry I dived in without reading carefully enough - all my experiments with this have suggested that playing something else broke the link, so there must be another element here.
The 'visitor' in this case seems to only be the Echo device, which has never been on my WiFi. My Sonos speakers do not show as available devices in the spotify app on my parents devices, but only appear in the list after instructing the Echo to play on 'living room', at which point it connects and starts playing in my house.

Wouldn't mind so much if they had better taste in music, but the 1950's swing starting on all on it's own is creeping me out.
Have you experimented to see if the link is broken as far as playing from the Spotify app is concerned? I have only ever tried it with the app, not Alexa.
Our posts crossed.
It seem most likely that the original registration to your Amazon account is involved somehow. Some sort of semi-permanent link via the Alexa and Spotify servers has been created. @BCM's advice seems pretty solid.
I'll have to give it a go this evening. Cheers guys.
Wouldn't mind so much if they had better taste in music, but the 1950's swing starting on all on it's own is creeping me out.

lol
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Hi All

I've seen this before and it was an Amazon Account cross-link, normally caused when the same device is used to set-up two systems. Can you follow these steps:

- Ensure that you don't have multiple Amazon accounts logged into different Apps on your device, as this can confuse the Amazon Authorisation. If yes, then please log out of the other accounts and then complete step 2.1 again;
- Open the Alexa App>Skills>Your Skills>Sonos and 'Disable' followed by 'Enable';
- If the problem still persists, please logout of all Amazon accounts then select the Alexa App>Skills>Your Skills>Sonos and 'Disable. Now power down all Sonos devices for 10 secs, allowing for any wired devices to boot before booting the remaining Sonos players. Now log back into the Alexa App>Skills>Sonos and 'Enable'
Quick update. The above suggestions haven’t fixed the problem unfortunately.

However it does appear to be an amazon account link & I was too quick to blame Spotify connect, this is because asking my parents Alexa to play tunein on my sonos also works, and removing my sonos devices from my Alexa account stops the problem until I add them back.

This is only happening with my sonos devices, my parents can’t control my hue lights, but it does work on any Alexa device logged in as my mums account, be it the dot I bought them and de-registered, their beam or straight from the Alexa app on my mums phone.
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You'll need to do the steps I listed on both yours and our parent's system.