I suspect that you still have friends who are no longer in your home still connected via Spotify Connect, and aren’t realizing that they are. They try to play music locally, but end up playing it on your system by mistake. 

The easiest thing to do to ‘break’ this connection so that they no longer have access is to play anything from a stream that is not Spotify, which stops all the Spotify Connect sessions with your system until such point as they are back inside your Wi-Fi signal, and then can reconnect their Spotify app to your Sonos. 

Ok, im not sure who would be on my spotify connect,  and it only seems to be playing songs from my Playlist, but I did turn it off.  I'm not really experienced in how spotify connect works...  it happens a lot though,  and very random

It was a thought, there have been a lot of people who haven’t understood the impact of that system and how it works, who have the same experience as you’re describing. 

Probably your best option would be to submit a system diagnostic within 10 minutes of experiencing this problem, and call Sonos Support to discuss it.

The data in that diagnostic should indicate what sent the ‘play’ command to the system. 

Thanks for your help! Having turned it off, should that cure the problem?   What do I lose by having it off?

Aside from the controller complaining you’d just have to wait out the startup time whenever you wanted to use it.

Possibly some lifetime issues from power-cycling it since it isn’t designed for that. No idea how severe but it has been mentioned here.

Since nobody has suggested it yet… Do you have a Sonos warmth loving cat?

Pardon?  Sonos warmth loving cat?

There have been cases of cats (I’ve experienced this), trying to be close to a warm object,  who ‘touch’ the controls on the top of the speaker, and cause it to resume. Being startled by the noise, they usually jump away,  so it appears as if the speaker started on its own. 

Sonos warmth loving cat!

Yep, but this is an amp mounted in the wall behind a TV. I'm going to have to submit a diagnostic,  it keeps happening 

Hi @spiel54, welcome to the Sonos Community!

I’ve had a look into your system and under the diagnostics I can see that the system is losing connection to your access points.

Sometimes, when a player loses connection then re-established its connection to the network, the speaker will try to resume what it was last doing, which in your case is playing from Spotify. In the diagnostics I can see that Spotify playback was initiated by Spotify around the same time the connection was re-established.

This is due to the way Spotify interacts with speakers or other devices, and what we call ‘the spell’. As Bruce suggested, you can break the spell by playing to your system from a different music service, such as Sonos Radio. You can also break the spell by going into the Sonos App → System → Tap on the speaker that is currently playing/last played from Spotify → End Session.

Although this will help prevent Spotify from restarting, the best way to resolve this would be to look into your network. As I stated earlier, your devices are losing connection to your access points and is most likely the cause of this issue. I’d recommend testing the system with one of your devices wired to the network to see if that helps.

If you’re still having issues, then I’d recommend reaching out to our support team and providing them with your network information for further assistance. 

I hope this information helps!