Spotify and Sonos sound like a dream combination. One is among the largest music streaming platforms with over 50 million songs. At the same time, the other is an innovative multiroom home speaker system brand changing the way we listen to music at home.
But can you play Spotify through the Sonos speakers? If so, what are the set of procedures? In this guide, we’ll explain how to connect Spotify to your Sonos speakers.
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How Do Sonos Systems Work?
When trying to connect Spotify to your Sonos speakers, you should learn the working of the Sonos environment to have a better understanding of the procedure. With this, when you encounter a problem, you can necessarily do a quick fix, if possible.
Sonos markets itself as a complete home music system platform. The speakers offered by Sonos can be installed in any room you want. There are specific speakers for each room type. For example, there are Sonos speakers specifically designed for kitchens, and speakers ideal for bedrooms. Similarly, Sonos One is the speaker if you want to have one in your bathroom. The best thing is you can connect all of these speakers from a central location, or a mobile app.
At its core, Sonos utilizes Sonosnet, which is a wireless mesh network connectivity protocol. The Sonos app acts as a controller. So music follows the room as you move around the house. A central WiFi system facilitates the connectivity of speakers throughout your house.
Streaming Music On Sonos Speakers
Sonos aims to offer all the music in the world. Therefore, it has partnered with music services like Apple Music, Amazon Prime Music, SoundCloud, and Spotify, among others. You need to connect the streaming service of your choice to the Sonos app and have it work with all of your speakers. All of this with a few taps and swipes.
This is a flexible way to enjoy music without worrying too much about compatibility issues. So the question as to whether or not you can play Spotify through Sonos is, yes, you can.
Sonos With Spotify
With Spotify, you get another added benefit. You can skip the process of connecting Spotify to your Sonos app. Instead, you have the option of connecting to the Sonos speakers from your Spotify app itself. This partnership was established back in 2016. It allowed Sonos users unparalleled control over connecting Spotify to their speakers.
How to Connect Spotify to Sonos?
There are two ways you can connect Spotify to your Sonos speakers. The first one is the traditional way of integrating the Spotify app into your Sonos app and then streaming it to the speakers. This is the de facto way of doing things for other streaming services.
The second way is to directly connect your Spotify app to the Sonos speakers, bypassing the Sonos app altogether. This made possible because of the strategic partnership Spotify has with Sonos. But each method has its limitations.
In this article, we’ll explore both of them and help you decide which one to adopt for connecting your Spotify account to the Sonos sound system.
Connecting with a Spotify Premium Account
Before you can start the process of connecting your Spotify account to the Sonos speaker system, you need to check whether you have a free or paid account. This is because the process of connecting both the versions is different, all thanks to the partnership deal two companies have with each other.
So, if you’re a premium or paid Spotify customer, this section will help you connect to your Sonos speakers. If you’re using a free Spotify account, then skip to the next section.
- Open the Sonos app on your phone
- From the bottom of the screen, find the Settings tab and click it.
- This will open the Settings menu. Find the Services tab with a music-mic icon and click it.
- Scroll to the very bottom of the options until you come across “List of Current Services.”
- Tap the Add a Service option, which should be next to a plus sign.
- This will list all the music services that are available to be added to the Sonos app. Scroll in alphabetical order till you find Spotify.
- Tap it, and on the next page, click Add to Sonos.
- Sign in to your Spotify account and authorize it if prompted to make changes.
- Now Spotify will appear on the services master list where you can search for songs, artists, playlists, etc.
As a final step, you need to ensure your Sonos speakers and your phone are connected to the same WiFi network. Open the Spotify app and play a song. From the options, select “Devices Available” and select Sonos speakers. That’s about it, and now you can listen to your favorite songs on Sonos from Spotify.
Connecting with a Spotify Free Account
Sonos, by default, requires a Spotify premium account to let you connect both the services. If you try to connect, it will read, “Spotify on Sonos requires a Spotify Premium Account. Please Upgrade at…”.
You can’t do much about it since this is the way the software is designed. But there’s a workaround you can employ that’d allow you to connect Spotify to Sonos even without a premium account.
Convert Spotify to MP3 format
Spotify music is encrypted. The songs you stream and download are protected by the DRM or Digital Rights Management tools. This is the same way Apple Music protects the songs. With a free account, you cannot save your songs locally. You can only stream music. But with a music converter, you can essentially convert Spotify encrypted music to plain format.
There is software out there, but the one we recommend is Sidify. Sidify is a music converter that is geared towards Windows and Mac users for loosely converting Spotify songs to regular audio formats like MP3, WAV, AAC, etc.
To start converting, follow the below instructions:
- Download and install the Sidify Music Converter on your PC, if you haven’t already.
- Launch the converter, which will automatically launch the Spotify Music app.
- Now head over to the Spotify app and search for the songs or playlist you want to convert.
- Once you find the song or playlist, right-click on it and click Share, which will copy the required URL.
- Click the Plus button to paste the URL.
- Now click OK to end the process of importing Spotify music to your local computer.
- Repeat the process for importing additional songs if you want.
- Now click the Settings button to customize the output format. You can choose from available formats like MP3, WAV, FLAC, etc. We recommend MP3.
- Finally, click the Convert button to initiate the conversion process.
Once all the songs are converted, Sidify will notify you of it. In this process, all the metadata and ID3 tags of the songs are preserved. This allows you to sort songs by artists, genre, and album.
As the final step, you need to import these converted songs to Spotify library or any other apps like Google Play Music. Now you can connect Spotify to Sonos speakers the way we described above.
If for some reason, you cannot use Sidify, another similar software you can try is NoteBurner. The conversion process will be, more or less, the same. You just need to install it on your computer or laptop and follow instructions. Once completed, import them into the Spotify app and play on your Sonos speakers.
Please note, this is not a recommended way of doing things by Spotify, nor Sonos. This is a workaround tactic.
Spotify Free Works on Certain Sonos Speakers
In November 2019, Sonos and Spotify added a feature to their respective software to let free users play Spotify music on selected Sonos speakers. This is similar to how you’d play songs from a Spotify premium account.
For this, you’d require an entry-level Symfonisk speaker. IKEA offers this in collaboration with Sonos. These speakers can be installed in multiple rooms. But it is meant to be a bookshelf speaker (at least, that’s how it is marketed).
With this, you can play music directly from your Spotify app and the entire catalog of 50 million songs made available. For this, you just need to add the Spotify app to your Sonos app, as we discussed above. Then you can control the songs from Spotify Connect for free playback.
If you already have one of these speakers, then you will have to upgrade the software, after which the feature will be supported.
Sonos already supports a variety of streaming services and radio stations. The budget Symfonisk speakers might be just the beginning since Sonos is hoping to onboard over 100 million of paying Spotify users onto its Sonos speakers ecosystem. In the coming future, we should more such innovations rolling out from both companies.
References:
- Spotify Free music now plays on Sonos speakers from theverge.com
- Spotify and Sonos from support.sonos.com
- Spotify Free now works on Sonos from spotify-everywhere.com
- The Best 2 Ways to Play Spotify Music on Sonos System from sidify.com