Instead of buying a radio/stereo - Alexa? What do i search for?

[andjustlikethisorthat]

God I'm so out of touch!

I need a new radio for my kitchen and would like to just ask Alexa to play certain songs.

What do I buy? When I put it in google it's bringing back echo dot & google nest.

Do I need anything other than WiFi for these things?

Just something simple for my little brain to cope with please 😂

An echo dot is an Alexa! All you need is a plug socket and wifi.

Echo dot. You just need Wi-Fi and a plug! I'd wait for the Amazon Black Friday deals as it's usually reduced

I have a sonos with Alexa. Depends on what sound quality you want really. If you want cheap then echo dot is what you need. You can just ask Alexa to play BBC1 for example.

For sonos, it's linked up to apps, so I have Spotify, Amazon Prime and BBC sounds linked. But I mostly just use Spotify.

You will need a subscription to Spotify or Amazon music or similar, as well as the device (echo dot etc). The subscription is the main expense.

You could just listen to radio stations or any music you already own without a subscription but you wouldn’t be able to ask for specific songs.

Oh no I thought I could just ask Alexa to play certain songs or kids music / chart music etc. what subscripts and how much is that?!
I don't want any more bills each month 😱🙈

Witthout a subscription you can get a certain amount of music for free via Alexa eg you can say “play party music” and it will play a playlist, or you can play free radio stations through eg BBC Sounds, but you can’t choose specific songs.

Do you have amazon prime, I think you get more with that?

@minipie Ok that will probably be enough for us. I only want chart stuff, Christmas songs and kids songs so think it will do me.

Thanks for the advice

If you have Amazon Prime, it comes with Amazon Prime music. The selection is very limited and I don't believe you get the chart stuff. You can get BBC radio station, but I only use it for Proms once a year. And I use their news for my morning routine.

Spotify family is £18/month. You can get similar with Amazon or Apple music.

This might be helpful. It explains what Alexa can play for music.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GVJ7368ZJGFBDQHW

And this is BBC sounds integration with Alexa. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/help/questions/listening-on-a-smart-speaker/alexa

Everything else you do need a subscription.

We do have Prime and Audible and regularly set up Alexa playlists, we've just set up the Christmas one for this year.

Alexa, create playlist Christmas 2023 and then you ask it to add songs, you can then ask it to play playlist.

My partner uses it a lot for audio books.

You could also look at setting up a playlist on YouTube if Alexa is too scary. 🙂