Spotify now lets you display what you’re listening to inside Messages in real time. This is called Listening Activity and it’s opt-in, so it’s off by default. If you’re not actively listening, your most recent song will be shown instead. It’s only visible to friends and family you’ve already connected with on Spotify via Inside Messages. You can see others’ activity even if you haven’t turned on your listening activity, as long as they’ve opted in.
To turn it on, go to Privacy & Social settings inside the Spotify app. Once enabled, activity appears in the chat row of the side drawer and at the top of chats in Messages. Only the contacts you select can see your activity, and you can of course turn this off at any time. If you tap on a friend’s listening activity, you’ll be able to add those tracks to your library, listen to them, open the track’s context menu, or react with one of the six standard emojis.
Request to Jam is a new way for you to invite friends you’ve connected with in Messages to join in on a live listening session. Jam has been available for a while, letting you listen with friends no matter where they are, but Spotify says, “It can be difficult to know when your friends will be available to listen together when you’re apart”.
That’s where Request to Jam comes in, which lets you see if someone is already listening, connect with them, and send messages in sync while they listen. From the Messages chat in Spotify, if you’re a premium user, you can tap Jam in the top right corner to send a request for a remote Jam. If your request is accepted, the request recipient becomes the host of the jam session, and you can both add tracks to a shared queue and listen together.
You can of course leave a Jam whenever you want, and pending Jam invitations will time out if they aren’t accepted within a few minutes. Both Listening Activities and Requests to Jam are being rolled out to Spotify users in markets where Messages is available in Spotify on both iOS and Android devices, and will be available broadly by early February. As previously indicated, only premium users can request jams, while listening activity is available to all users.
