How To Play Music on an Amazon Fire TV Stick

Jamie Read more July 25, 2019

There’s no shortage of ways to listen to music, but using the premium sound system you purchased for watching movies at home is probably one of the best ways to go about it. After all, why should you have to buy two different sets of speakers to accomplish the same task? The Amazon Fire TV Stick may be predominantly about movies and TV but it isn’t just a one-trick pony. Thanks to its litany of apps and other content, it can stream music right from your television, allowing you to take advantage of your soundbar or bookcase speakers and really jam when no one’s home.

How To Play Music on an Amazon Fire TV Stick

As usual with the Fire Stick, you have options for how to listen. You can use the Amazon Music App to stream. You can also add apps like Spotify or YouTube to your TV Stick or use a third-party apps like VLC or Kodi to play your own music.

Using the Amazon Music App

The Amazon Music App comes pre-installed on the Amazon Fire TV Stick already. All you need do is fire it up and any music you have purchased through Amazon will be available. Music Storage is no longer viable so you will only be able to play the music you bought to stream. The Amazon Music App runs fine and is accessed from Apps & Channels. If your Amazon Fire TV Stick is already set up, you should immediately see all your music purchases from within the app and just need to select one to begin playing.

Amazon Prime members can listen to 2 million songs and if you have an Amazon Music Unlimited subscription you can listen to over 40 million. If you don’t have either of those, these other methods will have you listening in no time.

Spotify, Pandora and other apps for Amazon Fire TV Stick

You can access your Spotify account from within the Amazon Fire TV Stick. Pandora, YouTube, Tidal, SiriusXM, iHeartRadio and TuneIn also have apps for the Stick too. Depending on what apps are being preloaded at the time, some will already be installed. Otherwise, access the App Store on your Fire TV Stick, install the relevant app, log into your account and begin streaming.

I have tested Spotify on the Fire TV Stick and it works fine. I had to download and install the app but once logged into Spotify, I was able to stream music through my TV without any problems. I would imagine the other apps are just as straightforward, although I haven’t tried them.

Play locally stored music on your Fire TV Stick

You can play your own music through the Amazon Fire TV Stick if you know how to set it up. You can use VLC for Fire or Kodi to play any music you have stored and accessible on your home network. For this to work, you will obviously need your audio to be accessible through your network on a shared folder. The rest is easy.

Setting up a shared music folder can be as simple as setting it up in Windows as a shared folder or by setting it up on a dedicated media server. Either way, the machine that has the music on it needs to be turned on and accessible on your network for the Fire TV to be able to see it and access the music on it.

Then:

If you want to use VLC, install it and open it.
Select Media and Open Folder.
Navigate to your music folder from within the app and Select Folder.
The contents of that folder should appear within VLC for Fire and be playable as long as they are in a supported audio format.

Using Kodi to play music on the Fire TV Stick:

If you have Kodi installed on your Fire TV Stick, open the app.
Select Music and then navigate to the shared folder containing your media.
Select a track or album from the folder to play.

If you don’t have Kodi installed on your Fire TV Stick, TechJunkie has guides on how to do just that. It takes less than fifteen minutes and adds a whole new dimension to using the diminutive little streaming stick. As Kodi could theoretically be used to access illegal content, it is not available from the Amazon App Store. You will need to sideload it to get it working but it’s a breeze if you follow one of our guides.

Amazon used to allow you to upload your own music to Amazon Music Storage which made accessing your content simple. Since its removal, you have to do a little more work to be able to play content you own. With VLC for Fire or Kodi, that is achievable as long as you know how to set up a network share. Otherwise, the Spotify, YouTube and other apps can get the job done if you don’t have Amazon Prime or Amazon Music Unlimited.

Do you know of any other ways to play music on an Amazon Fire TV Stick? Tell us about it below if you do!