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Since almost day one, Spotify has offered the ability to creep on your friends’ listening habits — but you could mostly only uncover those guilty pleasures on the desktop app. The company experimented with a community feature on the mobile app back in 2022, but it never officially launched. Now the company is finally bringing Listening Activity to the mobile app for real.
Listening Activity is opt-in, rather than opt-out, which is nice. To turn the feature on, you’ll need to go into your privacy settings on the mobile app. You can even choose which of your friends to share your listening activity with, just in case you don’t want to unfriend your old college buddies, but don’t need them to know how much you listen to Caspar Babypants now that you’re a dad of two.
In the mobile app, you’ll see what people are listening to in your sidebar alongside your chats. And, if something sparks your interest, you can quickly tap the song to add it to your library, or react with an emoji.
As part of this update, Spotify is also adding a Request to Jam feature. Premium users can tap the Jam button in a chat to send a request and, if the person accepts, their listening is remotely synced. From there, you can both queue up songs and chat to share your reactions. Spotify will even suggest songs based on your shared tastes. If you’re a free user, you can join a jam if you’re invited, but you can’t initiate a request.
Both features are rolling out on iOS and Android now in markets where messages are available. But Spotify appears to be taking its time with this launch, saying it will be “broadly available” in early February.
