Spotify may be adding 'listening' feature

Spotify is reportedly testing out a new social listening feature, allowing a group of friends to all simultaneously control the music they’re listening to. While similar to the collaborative playlist feature, what sets it apart is its real-time component. Essentially, collaborators could be listening to the same music together, whether physically together or not.

Software engineer Jane Manchun Wong, who often locates unreleased app features by digging through code, recently noticed the feature and posted about it on Twitter. Although she was able to find it buried in Spotify’s Android app code, the Social Listening feature is currently only available to Spotify employees.



Here’s how to use it: On Spotify, the button that redirects you to a page with your connected devices now also contains a “Connect with friends” option. Selecting that option prompts Spotify to generate a QR code and link, or an option to “scan code”, allowing you to either share your code with a friend or scan someone else’s. Once this is done, the “Now Listening” section of Spotify becomes social, showing you who’s listening in the “Connect with friends” module and allowing anyone connected to control the music.

However, Manchun Wong did say she was unable to determine how “real time” the feature would be, whether the song would be synchronised for people to virtually listen together, or whether they’ll be listening to the same song at different time codes. Moreover, it’s not clear whether playing a new song adds it to a queue or switches to the new song entirely.



This potential new feature is reminiscent of Turntable.fm, an app which shut down in 2013. This app allowed users to join each other’s “rooms,” where a user (as their avatar) would be DJ-ing, and the avatars of the other users in the room were shown to be dancing together. However, unlike Social Listening, only the room owner could control the music with chat features allowing other users to request songs.

This new feature obviously has the potential to be useful in situations such as being at a party, allowing multiple people to control to music from their own phones. While a lot of information about the feature remains unknown, an addition to the social and collaborative features of Spotify is bound to be widely appreciated.

This article originally appeared on Mashable.