There is no doubt that I love all six of my Echos. They are by far the most used devices in my house. They control everything from temperature, to lights, to locks. They’re also heavily used as music players throughout the house. Hardly a waking hour goes by without an Echo playing music in at least one room. And this is where the single most annoying feature of Alexa rears its ugly head.
You see, Amazon doesn’t allow anyone to run ads on the Alexa platform, but it’s a “do as we say, not as we do” situation, because Amazon is perfectly free to have Alexa advertise their services to you. Ask Alexa for a song that’s not included in Amazon Music, and you’ll get a lengthy schpiel about why you should sign up for Amazon Music Unlimited followed by a question asking if you’d like to sign up. If you were foolish enough to have the volume turned up when you made your request, you find yourself screaming “Alexa” over and over to stop her sales pitch.
If you’re foolish enough to request a song when another device is playing a song, you get an even longer pitch about how you could be playing music on multiple devices if you’d just sign up for Amazon Music Unlimited, followed again by the high pressure “Would you like to join Amazon Unlimited?” question.
There are two ways around this problem:
1- Give up and sign up for Amazon Music Unlimited. I’ve done this a few times when there were sales to sign up for $1 for three months. Although “unlimited” is a little pompous, as my first request was to play “Warm it up Kris” by Kris Kross and Alexa had no idea what I was talking about.
2- Change your primary music service from Amazon Music to something else. You can do this by going into the Alexa app, choosing settings, then music, then choose default music services. You will have to have added music services other than Amazon Music for this to work. And it’s not perfect. Many other music services don’t allow you to select specific songs, but instead make a station built off of that song, which will eventually play what you asked for.
In a perfect world, I’d like to see Amazon add the ability to simply turn off these prompts. But it’s not a perfect world, and Amazon has a captive audience of millions of Alexa users to sell to. Let me know if you have other solutions in the comments!
