How to Change Your Default Music App in iOS 14.5

Apple added a new option to change the default music player in the iOS 14.5 beta, a feature that will no doubt appeal to non-Apple Music fans.

Changing the default music settings isn’t fully worked out yet, but if you’re a beta user who prefers third-party music services, you can set it as the Siri default after updating to iOS 14.5.

How to set your default music service with Siri

1. Update 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 open a list of all the music apps you have installed and will ask “Which app do you want to use?”
4. Choose your favorite music app from the list.
5. When prompted, confirm that Siri can access data from your music app.
6. From there ‌Siri‌ will play the music in your app of choice. For example, if you choose Spotify, the music content will be played in Spotify.

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

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

Note that if you don’t see the option to select a default music service, you may need to restart your device. Some users have also reported that they cannot get the setting to the top, so it is possible that not all users will see it in this beta.

How to Change Your Default Music Service

At the moment, there is no ‌Siri‌ command or music setting to manually change the default music app you set through the ‌Siri‌ interface.

You may ask Siri to play music on another music service and sometimes this will shift the default setting. So if you’ve set Spotify as your default, but want to change back to ‌Apple Music “, you can say” Hey ‌ Siriwood, 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. You can also sometimes make the list reappear by asking for different services in quick succession or when downloading a new music service app, but now if you want a hassle-free experience, make sure to set it to the music service that your use most often.

We expect Apple to further flesh out the feature in future betas, so it’s likely there will eventually be a switch to set a music app as default on iOS, similar to how the settings work for default email and browser apps.