Get your station on Alexa
Listeners can ask a smart speaker for your station by name. It is free, it takes about five minutes, and this is exactly what to fill in so your submission is approved first time.
“Alexa, play KNBX.” For a lot of listeners a smart speaker *is* the radio now — it sits in the kitchen where a radio used to. Getting your station onto Alexa is free, Amazon does not charge for it and neither do we, and the whole thing takes about five minutes. What takes longer is getting it rejected and finding out a week later, which is what this guide exists to prevent.
Where this lives
Open Grow → Smart speakers in your dashboard. It checks everything Amazon checks and shows you the exact values to paste in. Included from the Pro plan.
1. How it actually works
Amazon runs something called the Radio Skills Kit. It is not an app you build — it is a form. You submit your station's details and stream URL, Amazon ingests it, and your station becomes playable by name on every Echo device. There is no code involved and no ongoing cost.
Amazon requires the station owner to submit
This is their rule, not ours: only the owner of a station may submit it, and aggregators like us are explicitly not eligible to do it on your behalf. So the final click has to be yours. Everything up to that click, we can do for you.
2. What Amazon checks
Your stream itself already meets their technical requirements — HTTPS, a standard MP3 stream, a real hostname, no login wall. That part is handled. What gets submissions rejected is the metadata, and it is always one of these:
| What they want | Why submissions fail |
|---|---|
| Station name | Rarely a problem — but avoid ALL CAPS, they reject it. |
| City | Frequently missing. They want the city you broadcast from. |
| Country | Frequently missing. Two-letter code, e.g. US, GB, AE. |
| Language | Frequently missing. e.g. en, en-US, ar. |
| Stream URL | Must be HTTPS with a hostname, never an IP address. |
| Logo | The most common failure — it must be square, at least 600×600. |
| Call sign | Optional. Internet-only stations usually have none — leave it blank. |
3. Fill in the gaps
Open Grow → Smart speakers. If anything is missing, the page tells you exactly what and links you straight to where to fix it. Most of it lives in Station settings under “Station details for directories”.
Fix the logo once, benefit everywhere
A square logo is required by Alexa (600×600 minimum), TuneIn (1200×1200 minimum) and Apple Podcasts (1400×1400 minimum). Upload one square image at 3000×3000 and you satisfy all three forever. A wide wordmark logo will be rejected by all of them.
4. Submit
- 1When the Smart speakers page shows You're ready to submit, click through to the Alexa console and sign in with an Amazon account.
- 2Add a station and paste in each value from your dashboard — they are laid out in the same order, with a copy button beside each one.
- 3Upload your square logo.
- 4Submit. Most stations are live on Alexa within 72 hours.
Great Britain and Ireland take longer
Amazon reviews GB and IE submissions manually, and it can take up to three weeks. Nothing is wrong — it is just a slower queue.
5. Test it
Once you get Amazon's confirmation, say “Alexa, play [your station name]” to any Echo. If she plays the wrong thing, it is almost always a name clash — a station somewhere else with a similar name. You can add alternate names in the Alexa console to steer her, which is worth doing if your name is at all generic.
6. What about TuneIn, Google and Apple?
The same details work everywhere, which is why filling them in is worth the five minutes. TuneIn has its own broadcaster portal at tunein.com/broadcasters — the same stream URL and a 1200×1200 logo, approved in 5 to 14 business days. Getting into TuneIn also gets you onto a lot of hardware internet radios and car systems, since they use TuneIn's directory.
Your MP3 direct link — the one Alexa and TuneIn want — is in Grow → Public page, on the Links tab. It is included from Pro.
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