Amazon Music for snowbirds

July 12, 2019 6:12 PM

My parents spend half the year in Canada and half the year in Florida. This has borked up their Amazon account. How can I fix it?

They bought an Alexa device in Florida. They then subscribed to Prime using an American credit card and US credit card tied to their Florida address in an effort to get music to play on it. It turns out they really don’t want Prime (which is $17 a month) and just want Amazon Music (which is $4 a month).

I tried to set this up for them and kept getting error messages which turned out, after some digging, to relate to their residence country not matching their billing country. We used my stepdad’s Amazon.ca account, and Canadian credit card, and got the damn thing working. Now, the question is, when they pack up the Alexa and take it to Florida with them, will the music still work? How can they best manage their nascent Amazon ecosystem given their cross-border lifestyle?

posted by ficbot to Technology (1 answer total)

I'm American but I live in the UK. Here's how I solved several cross-border Amazon problems: completely separate Amazon accounts in the two countries. That is, a different email address for each, using a local payment method and billing address for each. I don't use Alexa devices, so I don't know whether it's easy to switch accounts back and forth, but this was the only way I found to use Prime reliably in both countries, despite repeated attempts by Amazon support to fix things.

By comparison, I've never had any hassles with Spotify or Netflix. They just let me use the local catalogue, wherever I happen to be at the time I access their services.
posted by ddbeck at 2:05 AM on July 13, 2019 [1 favorite]