How to change your default music app on iOS 14.5

Apple on iOS 14.5 beta added a new option to change the default music player, a feature that will undoubtedly be attractive to non-Apple music fans.

Changing the music defaults has not yet been fully developed, but if you are a beta user who prefers third party music services, you can set them as Siri’s default after upgrading to iOS 14.5.

How to set your default music service using Siri

1. Upgrade to iOS 14.5 or iPadOS 14.5 on the iPad.
2. Ask ‌Siri‌ to play an artist, song or album with a request like “Hey ‌Siri‌, play Fleetwood Mac.”
3. ‌Siri‌ will display a list of all the music apps you’ve installed and ask “Which app would you like to use?”
4. Choose your favorite music application from the list.
5. If prompted, confirm that ‌Siri‌ can access your music app’s data.
6. From there, ‌Siri‌ will play the song in the application of your choice. If you chose Spotify, for example, the music content will be played on Spotify.

‌Siri‌ will tell you which music app was selected when the song is played, and you can also see a music app icon in the Now Playing window.

It was possible to play music from other services, clarifying which service you want ‌Siri‌ to use, such as “Hey ‌Siri‌, play music on Spotify”, but the change implemented in iOS 14.5 makes ‌Siri‌ your default music application, in a simple command like “Hey ‌Siri‌ play music” will use your favorite app instead of standardizing for Apple Music.

Note that if you are not seeing the option to select a standard music service, you may need to restart your device. Some users have also reported not being able to make the configuration appear, so it is possible that not all users will see it in this beta.

Changing your default music service

There is currently no ‌Siri‌ command or music configuration to manually change the default music application that you have configured via the ‌Siri‌ interface.

You can ask ‌Siri‌ to play music on a different music service and sometimes it will change the pattern. So if you have set Spotify as the default, but want to return to ‌Apple Music‌, you can say “Hey ‌Siri‌, play Fleetwood Mac on ‌Apple Music‌” or vice versa, “Hey ‌Siri‌, play Fleetwood Mac on Spotify.”

This sometimes changes the default music setting, but it is not completely reliable. Sometimes, you can also make the list reappear by asking about different services in quick succession or when downloading a new music service app, but for now, if you want an uncomplicated experience, make sure to set it up for the music service that you use most often.

We expect Apple to further develop the feature in future betas, so it’s likely that there will eventually be an alternation to setting a music app as default on iOS, similar to how the settings work for standard browser and email apps.