Garmin’s Vivoactive 3 Music adds Spotify support for tunes while you tone

By Kelly Hodgkins February 21, 2019

Those who rock a Vivoactive 3 Music fitness watch have an exciting new feature to check out: Spotify integration. Announced in October 2018, Spotify first landed on Garmin’s flagship Fenix 5 Plus series of smartwatches. As part of last year’s announcement, the company confirmed Spotify would also be coming to the company’s other music fitness watches, including the Forerunner 645 Music and the Vivoactive 3 Music. Garmin made good on its promise to Forerunner 645 Music owners, rolling out Spotify support for those watches at the end of October. After a few additional months of development, the Spotify app finally is available for the Vivoactive 3 Music.

Owners can download the Spotify app from the Connect IQ store and sync their Spotify premium accounts in just a few simple steps. Start by opening the Connect IQ store on a mobile phone using the Garmin Connect app. Search for Spotify and download the app to the watch. Once you open the app on your watch, you can enter in your Spotify account credentials using your phone and link the fitness watch to the music streaming service.

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The Spotify app only syncs with Spotify premium accounts, which include offline listening as one of their paid features. Spotify premium account holders can download selected playlists, albums, and podcasts to the watch using Wi-Fi, the Spotify app on their watch, and Garmin Connect on the phone. After the initial setup, no phone is required to listen to music. Once some music is synced over to the watch, owners can connect a pair of wireless earbuds and launch the Spotify app on the watch to access their offline racks. Users can control their music with the play, pause, shuffle, skip, and volume controls on their watches.

This music support is the icing on the cake for what was already a great watch, made even better by this new feature. Released in 2018, the Garmin Vivoactive 3 Music blends serious multisport tracking with lifestyle features such as sleep tracking, music support, and contactless NFC payments via Garmin Pay. To find out more about the Vivoactive 3 Music, read our recent review of the LTE version of Garmin’s popular all-around fitness watch.

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Kelly's been writing online for ten years, working at Gizmodo, TUAW, and BGR among others. Living near the White Mountains of…

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