Spotify to give family plan subscribers a free Google Home Mini speaker

Spotify is giving a Google Home Mini speaker to family plan subscribers for a song—free.

The music streaming service said Wednesday it would give master account owners of Premium for Family plans a free speaker that uses the artificial intelligence-infused, voice-driven Google Assistant. Spotify Premium for Family subscribers can have personalized Spotify accounts for up to six family members for $14.99 a month.

You can already ask Google Home devices to play music on Spotify, but this deal—which starts Thursday—aims to increase the reach of both the music service and the voice-friendly speakers.

"With the advent of voice and smart speakers this now becomes a key context where people are listening to music. So teaming up with Google to invest in voice and to bring a Google device to all our Spotify families is a holy smokes moment," said Alex Norström, Spotify's chief premium business officer. "Our goal is ubiquity. We want to be everywhere where our users are."

At its simplest, Spotify listeners can say, "Hey Google, play Spotify" and ask to skip all or part of a song. Beyond that, you could ask questions such as, "Hey Google, when did this song come out?"

This is just the latest move by Spotify to solidify its spot in the growing battle over smart speakers. Earlier this month, Spotify announced it was among the initial partners—along with others such as iHeartRadio and Pandora—on Facebook's upcoming voice-controlled, video-calling Portal speaker due in November. Spotify also has a deal with Samsung to have the music service on its phones and other devices, as well as the in-development Galaxy Home smart speaker.

Google and Spotify will work together to make it easier for users to access the music service on the tech giant's smart speakers, Norström says. That means "things like making the on-boarding experience and the activation experience much, much more seamless than it has been before," he said.

Spotify, which went public in April, has upgraded the free tier of its service to give those users the ability to skip and pick songs. Overall, Spotify has 180 million monthly active users, with about 83 million of those being paying subscribers.

Spotify family plan subscribers can claim their Google Home Mini (regularly priced at $49) beginning Thursday hrough Dec. 31 on the service's web site at spotify.com/us/family/" target="_blank">www.spotify.com/us/family/ .