Millions of iPhone and Android users get FREE Spotify upgrade this week
SPOTIFY is working on a handy new feature for users of its Android and iOS apps.
The tool, which is lined up for a future software update, will work similarly to the “Friend Activity” sidebar available on the desktop version of the music streaming platform.
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Friend Activity shows what a listener’s Facebook friends and other connections are currently listening to.
It’s been around for years, though only on the desktop apps on Windows and macOS.
A comparable feature, called “Community Hub”, will do much the same on Spotify’s smartphone apps in the near future.
It was unearthed earlier this month by Chris Messina, a tech blogger who digs through the code of apps to find upcoming features.
Messina posted a ten-second screen recording of Community Hub in action in a tweet on June 1.
It appears to show a tab within the app that displays what your friends are listening to alongside recent updates to their playlists.
The update does not display the Friend Activity sidebar in full but performs effectively the same function.
The name of people you follow on Spotify appears next to the song, artist and album or playlist that they’re streaming.
At the top of the tab, changes that people have made to their playlists appear in a carousel.
You can follow someone on Spotify – be they an artist or a stranger whose music taste you gel with – by hitting a button on their profile.
If you link your Spotify account to your Facebook profile, you can choose to automatically follow everyone on your Friend list.
Community Hub is expected to roll out to users around the globe in a future software update.
A version of it is already visible online. Type “spotify:community” into the address bar of Safari on iPhone or iPad to view a test page.
It comes after Snoop Dogg in April finally lifted the lid on his decision to pull the Death Row Records catalogue from Spotify.
The American rapper bought the iconic record label, whose artists include Tupac Shakur, Dr Dre and Snoop himself, back in February.
Within weeks, a number of fan-favourite albums had disappeared from digital streaming platforms such as Apple Music and Spotify.
Snoop has now confirmed in an interview that he made the surprise move in response to the services’ close-fisted payment practices.
“First thing I did was snatch all the music off those platforms … because those platforms don’t pay,” the 50-year-old said during the latest episode of the Drinks Champs podcast.
“And those platforms get millions of millions of streams, and nobody gets paid other than the record labels.”
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