Siri and music

Music for free

You probably know that YouTube has a large library of music of most genres. Even if you can't see the videos, YouTube is often a good way of listening for free to the music you love - so long as you can tolerate some advertising. Siri can be instructed to play videos and will search YouTube for the music you request. It's best to have the YouTube app installed; please do that first if necessary. 

The first time you try the commands below, you may be asked to give Siri permission to access your YouTube data. Siri may not offer you the opportunity to speak your response and you may need to locate and respond to the Yes button on screen.

The YouTube app may also offer you alternatives that you need to locate and select.

Try requests like:

"play YouTube video Mahler Symphony number one";

"play YouTube video Nowhere Man";

"play YouTube video A Night in Tunisia";

Your request will often start the requested video playing, probably preceded by advertisements. Playback can be paused and resumed with a two finger double tap as usual. Sometimes, you may be presented with choices by the YouTube app and you will need to check and respond to them if they pop up.

You may not need the word YouTube in your request. Whether it is necessary or not will depend on what other services you have installed on your phone.

Of course, this kind of request to Siri will also find general YouTube videos, for example:

"play YouTube video Berlin wall falls".

If your original request doesn't work, try some variations including omitting the word YouTube and also vary the text of the item you are searching for.  A little persistence usually pays off.

Music subscription services

Siri can play music using many music streaming services, such as Apple Music, Amazon Music and Spotify. In order to be able to play specific tracks or albums you will need to be paying a subscription to these services. The Apple Music app is pre-installed on devices but you will need to install the relevant app if you want to use another music streaming service.  The first time you ask Siri to play a piece of music or an album, it should ask which of the music apps on your device you want it to use.  Once instructed, Siri will always play music using that app. Don't experiment with this setting since, according to one source, it can be changed only by totally deleting everything that Siri remembers about your preferences on your device by going to Siri Settings and deleting the device's Siri and dictation history. I have experimented with this a few times and it doesn't always allow me to reset the preferred music source. However, I did seem to be able to reset it by saying something like "play nowhere man using Apple Music".

Siri's process for selecting the preferred music streaming service wasn't ideal for VoiceOver users when I first wrote this page (May 2021). Hopefully it will have improved, but I don't want to test it too often and I haven't tested it yet for iOS 17. The problem is that Siri speaks a request to tell it which service to use but doesn't speak the names of the available services before it asks for your answer. So long as you speak the correct name of your preferred music service when prompted by Siri all is fine.  If you don't remember the correct name, Siri will be displaying the list of available services near the top of the screen, so you can locate this list and have VoiceOver speak it to you. You might find it simplest then to cancel your request to Siri and ask it again to play a specific piece of music and tell it the correct name of your streaming service when prompted.

The commands you can use to play music are fairly natural, for example:

"Play Let it Be"

"Play music by Alan Barnes";

"Play new music by Alan Barnes";

"Play the Elgar Cello Concerto";

"Play new country and western music";

"Play new classical music";

"Play album Tubular Bells";

"Play music by The Beatles";

"Play piano duets by Schubert";

"Play music by Ed Shearan";

"Play nursery rhymes";

"Play latin playlist";

"Add this to  playlist latin" - you can say this while the song is playing or immediately after it has finished playing;

"Download playlist latin";

"Love this" - this will tell Apple Music that you like the music you have just played or are playing and will help Apple to suggest relevant new music to you.;

Classical music

Siri isn't great at playing complete works of several movements or playing specific performances of classical works for you. Classical music fans are best advised to learn to use the Classical app with VoiceOver on their iPhone which provides a very powerful tool for locating works and performances. The Music app is fine for many music genres but doesn't have the concept of a work that may span over several tracks of a recording. The Classical app can be used by anyone with an Apple Music subscription.

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