Hello @tim000001,

Welcome to the Sonos Community and thank you for reaching out with your question. 

If you have added these multiple Spotify accounts to Sonos, you will be able to manually trigger playback and switch between the profiles within the Sonos app.

At this time you can only link one Spotify account to an Amazon Alexa account at a time, so voice-triggered playback between these accounts won’t be possible until this changes.     

This is a fundamental problem with Sonos’ Alexa/Spotify integration.    I have a Sonos One in my bedroom and in the kitchen, and a Spotify family account.   Whenever the kids play something in the kitchen using Alexa, it cuts out the music in my bedroom.

The whole point of Spotify family is to be able to have multiple streams at the same time.   But Alexa/Sonos simply doesn’t work with this.  It’s a pretty fatal shortcoming in a multi-room speaker system.

What is the workaround?  I know I could try telling the kids not to use Alexa (and to use their phones instead to play music in the kitchen).  But that defeats the purpose of having voice control.  

I am really stunned that Sonos has no solution to this.  There must be a way to set up the speakers to use different spotify sub-accounts.

The Problem is not Sonos in this case, but Amazon. You can only link one Spotify account with you Alexa account and that’s the issue here. Workaround is using Amazon Music, very surprisingly that is working well with family accounts...

Hello @Vogon,

Thank you for reaching back out to us. As @Outburst points out, this is an Amazon limitation between Amazon & Spotify, it just carries over into Sonos since only one Alexa account can be linked to Sonos at a time. 

The only available workaround until Amazon Alexa allows you to link more than one Spotify to its voice service accounts is to use different music services if you want voice commands to work. Alternatively you can opt to trigger playback from either the Spotify app or the Sonos app directly.  I wish that I had a better answer for you at this time but this account linking issue is unfortunately out of our hands at the moment.  

OK, so after much trawling around these forums, I found out that there is a workaround, but it is not straightforward to set up (at least for me).

You will need

• 2 x Sonos accounts
• 2 x Amazon accounts
• 2 x wifi networks
• Spotify family account (provides 6 accounts)

You set up 2 separate Sonos networks on 2 different wifi networks.  Associate each Sonos installation with a different Amazon/Alexa account.   Link each Alexa account to a different Spotify sub-account from the family account.   

When setting up each network, you need to (i) have all the devices for the other network powered off, and (ii) use a dedicated device as the Sonos controller for that network, logged into the right wifi network and Sonos account.   

It took me about 2 days to get it working.  Issues I encountered

• Need to factory reset some of the Sonos speakers to clear their settings so they could be installed on a different network/account.
• I first tried using a Guest wifi network as the second one, but this didn’t work.  I don’t know if this was because of its guest status (prevents access to other devices on the network) or because of the next problem.
• When I moved on to trying a second normal wifi network, it kept telling me that the wifi password was wrong, even though it wasn’t.   Took me ages to solve this, but finally changing the router settings so that the channel selection was “Auto” did the trick.
• I couldn’t get one of my wired Connects to connect back to the reconfigured system.  Took ages to solve this too.  Seems to have been somehow caused by a 4-port switch that was originally between this device and the main switch.  Connecting it directly to the main switch solved the problem immediately.

This setup solves my problem: the speakers in the public areas of the house are all on one Alexa/Spotify account, whereas the ones in my bedroom/bathroom are on another.  I can now enjoy my music in the shower in peace without the children’s choices in the kitchen interrupting me!

… @Vogon… or you can do that.

Wow!

As a representative of this fine company, I would not have been able to suggest something like this in good conscience but this is certainly how you can achieve your desired set up.

You will need to be aware of which WiFi network your phones and other controlling devices are connecting to and be leery of any “unable to connect to system” messages as the connection process could inadvertently merge the systems again.

Please keep us posted on how this set up is working for you as they do tend to be a little less stable than your average Sonos system.

I would also advise that you not ask Alexa for any Vogon poetry. Neither myself, Sonos nor Amazon Alexa would be responsible for any adverse side-effects.