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I bought a Google Home, and now I can't listen to music at work

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1–10 of 17 posts

Re: I bought a Google Home, and now I can't listen to music at work

#5
post #2

The Echo does this with Spotify too, fwiw. I ended up creating a separate account in my Spotify family for the Echo to link to Spotify, which is less than ideal as you lose your personal playlists, etc.

Same here. These services charge $5 more for a family plan, which lets you use five or six accounts. So you can make an extra account for your home devices, and then you have extra memberships you can give away for free to your family/friends. It’s not a great user experience but works well as a solution.

Re: I bought a Google Home, and now I can't listen to music at work

#6
post #2

The Echo does this with Spotify too, fwiw. I ended up creating a separate account in my Spotify family for the Echo to link to Spotify, which is less than ideal as you lose your personal playlists, etc.

We actually canceled our shared Spotify account due to many similar friction points. The main benefit of Spotify was being able to discover new music, and I found it wasn't much better at that than subscribing to specific YouTube channels. The $10/month that I was paying to Spotify now goes towards about 10 DRM-free $1 songs per month, and considering how long I've been paying for Spotify, I think it's worth it. I imagine more of this $1 goes to the artist, too, compared to the royalties they'd probably have gotten from Spotify.

Re: I bought a Google Home, and now I can't listen to music at work

#8
post #4

I'm a little confused as to why this question from 2015 is on the front page of Hacker News. The answer (which may not have been available at the time) is "get a family account, which allows multiple simultaneous streams".

> You can still only stream music from one device at a time on a single Google Id even with the Family Plan.

Is this no longer the case?

Re: I bought a Google Home, and now I can't listen to music at work

#9
post #4

I'm a little confused as to why this question from 2015 is on the front page of Hacker News. The answer (which may not have been available at the time) is "get a family account, which allows multiple simultaneous streams".

reading through the thread though I get the impression that this is not necessarily the case.

Re: I bought a Google Home, and now I can't listen to music at work

#10
post #4

I'm a little confused as to why this question from 2015 is on the front page of Hacker News. The answer (which may not have been available at the time) is "get a family account, which allows multiple simultaneous streams".

It does not (directly) allow multiple simultaneous streams. It allows multiple simultaneous users. This means setting up a dummy google account for each device that you wish to have play simultaneously, which is a bit of a pain.

Ideally it would be more Netflix-style, which puts a limit on the number of devices but does not really care about "identity", though obviously sharing the password to your Google account is a non-starter for family sharing cases.

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