Can’t Connect Spotify to Google Home? Try This

I had recently decided to start getting involved in doing reviews on some Google products, one of which is the Google Home Mini. I had been putting it off for quite some time as I wanted to see how this technology develops, and if it was more of a fad or novelty rather than something genuinely useful. I think, in the early days at least, there were a whole lot of limitations to where you might very well consider Google’s assistant as being more of a novelty, but as I have been working through my review it has become clear that this is indeed an enormously powerful technology. So, whilst I’m going through the endeavor of learning all of it’s little quirks and some other limitations, one of the things I wanted to do was to connect my Spotify app in order to listen to my music.
Now, you would think that this would be a super simple process, right? In fact, if you search online for how to do this, both Google and Spotify have very simple guides on how to achieve this. And yet, to my surprise, I just couldn’t get it to work for me.

What the guides tell you to do is to head on over to the Google Home app on your device, then tap on the + in the top left corner, select Music and audio, and then select Spotify as your music player. The problem is, my device didn’t show Spotify here. Even though I have managed to sort out the main issue of connecting Spotify to my Google account, Spotify still does not show up here. Weird, huh?

OK, so initially I did get Spotify to connect to my Google account, but when I asked the Home Mini speaker to play a specific track, I got a response saying that I must have a premium membership for Spotify to do so. This was weirdness number 2 since I absolutely do have a premium membership. This is where some major head-scratching began for me in trying to sort this out. 

My first inclination was to hop on over to Google’s support site and start a chat with one of the support staff. Well, after more than an hour I was even more frustrated because the support member kept hammering on about things that had absolutely nothing to do with my issue. I know this because I obviously managed to sort out the issue, and nothing that this person kept going on about had anything to do with what actually fixed the issue. 

Eventually I came across a post online which said that you should go into your phone’s settings, and then clear all of the storage data for Spotify. After doing that, you’d need to log in again, but you should not log in with the email ID that you’d normally use to log into Spotify, but rather your “device username”.
This can be found on either the emailed receipt of your subscription payment to Spotify, or you can see it under your account information on the Spotify website. Log in to your account on the site, then click at the top right on the 3 horizontal lines next to your profile picture (or “Profile” if you are using a desktop browser), and then select “Account”. From here you are going to want to click the drop-down menu towards the top which says “Account Overview” and then select “Set Device Password”. If you’re on the desktop site, then just look for “Set Device Password” on the left menu. Here you’ll see the device username (a long string of random numbers and letters), and if you haven’t set a password you should do so. Make a note of that long username because you will need it.

OK, once that is done we will need to perform what is arguably the most confusing part of the process. 

Go to the main page of the Google Home, and then tap on the microphone towards the bottom centre. This will call up the Google assistant, but what you need to do instead is to click on the little compass icon towards the bottom right. Now type in “Spotify” in the search bar towards the top. Here you’ll see if Spotify has been linked to your Google account. If it says “Unlink” then it means that there is a link, but go ahead and tap on “Unlink”. The rest of this process will apply to you even if it was previously linked. Now tap to create a link with Spotify. You’ll be asked to log in with your Spotify credentials, but you will need to use that long “Device username” as the username, and then use the password that you had previously created.

So, that should be it, that should get you hooked up if you were having the same issue as I was. I still have no idea why Google Home couldn’t just see from my usual Spotify information that I have a premium subscription, and I also don’t know why Spotify still doesn’t show up in my Google Home app. But, whatever, it works now and I can happily play whatever I want via my Home Mini.

I hope this will help someone out there as I know how frustrating it can be to figure these things out, even more so when Google’s support don’t know what to do either.