Spotify adds real-time listening activity to Messages, with group chats coming soon

Spotify rolled out a Messages feature in August last year, and today, the company is expanding its functionality with Listening Activity and Request to Jam.

Listening activity is an opt-in feature that allows Spotify users to display the music they’re currently listening to within Spotify Messages in real-time. If you’re not actively listening, your most recently played song will be displayed instead.

Listening activity is visible only to friends and family you have already connected with on Spotify Messages. You can see others’ activity even if you haven’t turned your own activity on, as long as they’ve opted in.

If a user taps on their friend or family member’s listening activity, they’ll be able to add tracks to their library, start playback, open the track’s context menu, or react with one of six standard emojis.

Spotify Jam is one of my favorite features, and I frequently use it for joint listening sessions with my long-distance friends. However, coordinating a Jam session is a task by itself. With Listening activity now being a feature, it’s easier to figure out when someone is actively listening to music on Spotify, and so, the company is adding a Request to Jam feature to complement it.

Within a Spotify Messages chat, users can tap Jam in the top right corner to send a request for a remote Jam session. Your friend can either accept or decline the Jam, and if they accept it, they become the host of the Jam session. Both participants can add tracks to a shared queue and listen together. Pending Jam invitations will time out if they aren’t accepted within a few minutes.

Listening activity and Request to Jam are now rolling out to users in Messages-enabled markets on iOS and Android devices, and will be broadly available in these markets by early February. Listening activity is available to all users with Messages access, and Free users can join a Request to Jam session when invited by a Premium user.

Additionally, Spotify also plans to expand Messages to support Groups in select markets in the near future. The company mentioned this in an email to us, although the public press release makes no mention of it yet.