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Amazon Music keeps cutting out on Sonos system

I’ve been having ongoing issues with Amazon Music streaming on my Sonos system. The problem only happens with Amazon Music — all my other services (Spotify, Pandora, etc.) stream perfectly without interruption.

When I play Amazon Music through the Sonos app, the music will randomly cut out, stop in the middle of a song, or skip ahead to another track on its own. It happens across my speakers at the same time, which makes listening really frustrating.

For context, I have two Sonos Amps (one powering my inside speakers and one for my outdoor deck speakers), a Sonos Move 2, a Sonos Move, an Arc Ultra system, and a regular Arc system. No matter which part of my setup I use, the issue is the same.

I’ve tried the usual fixes — rebooting my router, updating Sonos software, removing and re-adding Amazon Music, and following community troubleshooting suggestions — but nothing has solved it.

It’s especially frustrating because Amazon Music worked fine on Sonos for years, and now suddenly it’s unstable. The fact that every other streaming service I use works flawlessly makes it pretty clear this is an Amazon Music + Sonos problem.

Sonos Support / Amazon Music Team: can you please investigate this? Clearly, I’m not the only one experiencing cutouts and skips with Amazon Music on Sonos. It would be great to know if there’s an official fix coming.

If anyone else has a reliable workaround beyond the basics, I’d really appreciate hearing about it.

Sonos Support doesn’t ‘work’ from these forums, this is for ‘community’ posts. The closest you’ll get to a Sonos employee will be a forum moderator.

There’s a couple of things that I’d suggest about your situation. First is that you can’t rule out the density of the stream coming from Amazon might be different than your other tests to run up against wifi interference, which might be just enough to impact one stream, but not the others.

Second, in the steps you’ve taken, which are good, you don’t mention if you rebooted the router while the Sonos were powered off (unplugged). This would impact things if there were a DNS change that wasn’t properly carried from your router to the Sonos devices. If you have, it’s not an issue, if you haven’t, it’s just more (unfortunate) effort.

I haven’t run into any recent issues with Amazon Music, but I also don’t use it daily. I think I would recommend that you submit a system diagnostic within 10 minutes of experiencing this problem, and call Sonos Support to discuss it. Don’t post the resulting diagnostic number here, they get sensitive about GDPR.

There may be information included in the diagnostic that will help Sonos pinpoint the issue and help you find a solution.

When you speak directly to the Support staff, they have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your network and Sonos system.

I pretty constantly have something from Amazon playing, not seeing any issues recently but did in the past.

In my case it ended up being networking issues where my CD quality streams worked well but the higher bitrate Amazon streams didn't always get delivered across my wireless router/AP to Sonos links.

Thank you for your replies. I’ve done some more troubleshooting since my original post and noticed two things:

  1. Adding a third speaker group – Whenever I add a third set of speakers in the Sonos app, the audio starts cutting out. As soon as I remove that third set, the issue disappears.

  2. Network/user interaction – I was able to listen for hours on a single speaker streaming Amazon Music without any issues. But when my son came home and his phone logged into the network, the song immediately froze and cut out. (He also has Amazon Music under my family plan.)

I submitted diagnostics to Sonos Support right after replicating the issue and was hopeful they’d see something useful. Unfortunately, the representative I reached wasn’t very helpful, and despite the timing, they said they couldn’t identify any problems.

The diagnostic window is fairly short, 0 to 10 is good,  maybe to 15 minutes, before it is overwritten by new data. Get your system to act up and submit a diagnostic. Maybe one for the multiple speaker issue and a second for the phone issue.

Call in again and ask for assistance and if it is less than you need ask to be escalated to a higher level of support. Let us know what happens, the moderators will usually see your feedback too and can sometimes give support a gentle nudge towards resolving your issue.

On your own you can try some local solutions.

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/recommended-settings-for-using-sonos-on-wireless-networks

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/improve-your-sonos-products-wifi-connection

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/topic/connection-issues

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/understanding-the-network-details-section-in-the-sonos-app

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/reduce-wireless-interference

 

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