After Shazam, if there’s one plugin millions of music streamers across the world have been yearning for–– it’s social interaction, especially amongst friends and close contacts. Why can’t I see what my friends are listening to? I mean, the fact that we’re friends shows that we share a few or more things in common, and music could be one of that. The reason we miss BlackBerry Messenger days.
All that is about to change, on 22/06/2022, TechCrunch confirmed that Spotify is working on rolling out most wanted feature yet. ‘Community‘ will allow mobile users view what sort of music their friends are streaming in real-time, as well as the playlists they’ve recently updated in a dedicated spot. Spotify currently offers a similar ‘FRIEND ACTIVITY‘ on desktop but with limited access for mobile users.
This isn’t the first time the company is considering the social share/interaction fucntion; in its early days the app utilized its facevook integration in building a friend graph. As it grew, user personlaization became a much bigger priorty to leverage its competitors, further putting strong focus on discovery playlists to help subscribers’ journey.
Even after a public poll before COVID-19 that attracted over 7,000 votes in support of ‘Friend Activity’ on mobile a few years ago, Spotify still resisted the outrage. Not for too long though.
For those who are actively listening, animated music equalizer bars appear next to their name and music selection. Otherwise, the screen will show you when your friend had listened to Spotify and what they had streamed. In an updated version of the Community tab, Spotify added timestamps to the playlist updates as well so you can view the most recent additions.
The feature doesn’t appear to be fully functional in our tests. You can currently tap on the playlists to see the song list, but tapping on a friend’s music doesn’t let you play the song, too. That will likely change when or if the feature becomes publicly available.
