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Friends and families can now listen to music together in real-time, regardless of where they are in the world, with Spotify’s new feature.
At the beginning of May, Spotify introduced a new group session feature for premium users. The feature allowed friends, relatives and housemates in the same location to share control of a playlist and queued music.
While this was an interesting feature, it was limited by the fact that all listeners had to be in the same location – especially when travel and social events were discouraged as a result of Covid-19 restrictions.
On Tuesday (28 July), Spotify announced that it was finally making this feature accessible to users who are not physically in the same location. The feature is now available for groups of two to five people to use by sharing a ‘join’ link through messaging apps or social media.
Evolving group sessions
The company suggested a range of use cases for the new feature, including having a virtual BBQ with family members in different cities, a podcast date with your long-distance partner, or coordinating a long-distance group jog with friends.
In a statement, the company said: “No matter the distance – whether six feet apart or a thousand miles away – you and the members of your squad can now each listen to the same content at the same time on your own devices (as well as control playback).”
The company noted that the group session feature is still in beta, so users should expect the experience to continually evolve over time.
In order to use Spotify’s group sessions, users simply click or tap the ‘Connect’ menu in the bottom-left corner of the play screen and scroll down to ‘Start a group session’. They will then receive a link to share with guests who will be joining the session.
From there, the host and guests can pause, play, skip and select tracks on the queue as well as add in choices of their own using the standard controls. If one person makes a change, it will immediately be reflected on all participant devices.
