Spotify is finally giving millions of free users a crucial feature that paid users have had for years

Monica Chin/Business Insider

Amazon's latest Echo speaker, which is powered by Alexa, will now support free streaming on Spotify.

• Spotify is the world's most popular music streaming service, with over 100 million paying subscribers and over 217 million monthly users.
• Spotify's paying users get access to certain functionality that free users do not. One such feature was the ability to stream Spotify music on Amazon's Alexa-powered Echo devices, Sonos speakers, and Bose speakers.
• That changed on Wednesday, as Spotify announced support for free users across a variety of devices.
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Spotify has over 100 million people paying monthly for its music streaming service. The reason is simple: Ads.

Paying a monthly subscription fee to Spotify means accessing a massive library of on-demand music without having to encounter any advertising. It also infers other benefits: Saving music for offline listening, for instance, and the ability to stream through Spotify on a variety of home speakers - including Amazon's ubiquitous echo devices.

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As of Wednesday, though, Spotify is finally offering free users a feature that paid users have had for years: The ability to stream music through Amazon's Alexa-powered Echo devices, in addition to Sonos and Bose speakers.

Sonos

A wide array of Sonos home speakers.

Just like Spotify's free version for smartphones and elsewhere, the free version on the newly-supported devices is expected to run ads.

In its announcement blog post, Spotify specifically names Amazon's Echo and Fire TV devices, Sonos' various home speakers, and Bose's "smart speakers and soundbars" as getting support for free Spotify users.

It's a small change that impacts a massive number of Spotify users - though the company boasts over 100 million paying subscribers, it has over 248 million monthly users. For now, however, it sounds like support for the devices is limited to Australia, New Zealand, and the US.