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Spotify gives away Google Home Minis in the US

By | Published on Thursday 1 November 2018

Spotify

Spotify is now offering subscribers a free Google Home Mini so that they can have some voice-activated Spotify goodness in their lovely mini homes. I say subscribers, the free gift is only available to those who sign up for the Spotify Premium Family plan in the US over the next two months. So, a mini promo for a mini group of Spotify users. But voice-activated.

The Mini is the economy line version of the Google Home device, the web giant’s voice-activated internet-connected blob that competes with the Amazon Echo and Apple’s HomePod, among a plethora of other smart speaker type gadgets on the market.

The tie-up is interesting because Google is in the streaming music business itself, of course, and more so than ever since the launch of the YouTube Premium music set-up. Meanwhile Spotify has been considering its own move into the smart speaker domain.

Despite this, the partnership presumably works based on the “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” maxim, with both Spotify and Google likely seeing Apple and Amazon as the bigger foes in the streaming and smart speaker domains.

Spotify also previously announced a relationship with another Apple/Amazon competitor, Samsung, to make it easier to use the streaming service on that firm’s smart speaker product, the Galaxy Home.

While Amazon has worked with competitors to make its voice-activated assistant Alexa more widespread and its Echo devices more adaptable – more so now that it’s made its Music Skill API publicly available – Alexa still chooses Amazon Music by default and Apple has made its HomePod much less receptive to rival music services.



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