Radio Spotify

Finally, FINALLY! Spotify rolled up a new update that actually makes some sense.

I mean, who asked for goddamn pop-up info of an artist every time their song was playing on the desktop app? It’s an entire playlist full of their discography which I’ve been listening to for years, for God’s sake. The huge interruptive window really overshadowed the social feature that lets me stalk and silently judge my friends’ music taste – which, sometimes, can be a way for me to discover new music.

What the hell is this?

I’m a very passionate user of the streaming service, but sometimes I wonder what’s the thought process behind all these weird updates. Oh let me guess, one of those sophisticated longitudinal big data analyzed using predictive algorithms? What about you giving actual people a spot on your platform, just a pinch of that human touch, you know? Maybe feature some top-notch local playlist curator whose playlists do significant numbers instead of shoving only Spotify-made playlists up our throat whenever we try to find something new?

But I guess we did get the next good thing that takes actual people into consideration: The Spotify Jam.

It basically lets you listen to music on Spotify together, in real-time, with up to twenty people in the same session. One user would initiate the “Jam” feature, and a particular link will be open to share to your 20 friends or less.

I think I’ve tried out this feature several months ago with my partner, but only through a short-notice pop-up link, which I couldn’t really access other than that one time. I guess I was a “victim” of the A/B testing.

By the time I’m writing this, it’s still available on mobile apps only (what’s with desktop apps getting all the shitty updates anyway).

Based on our impromptu trial last week, the feature was going rather smoothly. The songs played on our respective devices with little to no delay to each other. When one of us skipped the song, it immediately also skipped on the other’s phone. When one of us changed the playlist, the other one also listened to the playlist. Etc etc.

It worked both ways, so not only one person can control the music and such. It worked for the two of us whose music taste overlapped and we listened with the same intention. I wonder if there would be chaos ensuing in extreme test cases like filling the whole Jam session with the maximum 20 users and having all of them fight for control over the music. My optimism guessed it would be too much hassle for the 20 people to connect through certain links just to troll (but I could be underestimating the internet culture).

So far we’ve used the feature to spice up one long-distance phone call when I was back home for the long weekend, and to listen together to a playlist we like while we hung out in a cafe (instead of the boring lo-fi ambience songs from a shitty speaker).

I still can’t come up with other possible use cases, though. I figured this is quite a niche feature that wouldn’t work unless you have friends or a partner that also shares the same music taste and willing to put in that extra effort to join via a link shared through other social media channels. Perhaps in the future we can directly join a friend’s listening session via Friend Activity feature? That’d be great.