Photo Credit: Spotify
Spotify launches Messages last year to give friends a place to chat about music within the app. Now it’s bringing new features including listening activity and requests to jam. Here’s how it works.
Spotify says since launch more than 40 million users have sent nearly 340 million messages using the Spotify app. These new features are intended to make Messages even more robust. Listening activity gives users a real-time look at what music their friends and family are listening to—similar to Last’.fm’s scrobble feature that was popular in the early 2000s. Meanwhile, the ‘Request to Jam’ feature is the ability to ask friends to join a shared listening session.
Listening activity is an opt-in feature that allows users to display what music they’re currently listening to as their Messages status. If you’re not actively listening to music, the last-listened to song will appear instead. The feature is only visible to friends and family that you have connected with on Messages. Users who haven’t opted-in can still see others’ listening activity, even if they choose not to show their own activity.
Users can turn on this new feature via the ‘Privacy & Social Settings’ tab. If a user taps on their friend’s listening activity, they can choose to add that track to the library, start playback, or open the track’s context menu. Spotify says to complement this feature, ‘Request to Jam’ is a new way to invite friends and family into a shared music listening session. The feature makes it easy to see when someone is listening, join them, and even message in sync while listening.
These two new features are rolling out now to both iOS & Android devices, with broad availability expected by February. Listening activity is available to all users with Messages access, while free users can join requested jam sessions when they are initiated by a Spotify Premium member.
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