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Spotify will finally give you real profile tools to make music listening more social
- Spotify is making progress on the ability to change usernames, although you’ll be limited on how often you can switch.
- The app also appears to be planning to expand bios from just artists to all listeners.
- Users will be able to set limits on who’s able to see their bios.
Listening to music may sound like one of the most passive activities in the world, but when you build up a whole app around the experience, and start connecting users with sharing tools and interesting stats, the opportunity for that passive listening to evolve into a community really starts taking shape. Spotify as we know it today offers some basic social features, but it looks like the company’s hard at work on fleshing those out even further.
Back around the start of the year we first spotted work towards giving Spotify users a little more control over their in-app identify, with the app developing the ability to change your Spotify username. Considering the random string of characters most users have as their automatically set default name, that sounded like it could go a long way towards encouraging the use of the app’s social features.
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Digging into the changes present in Spotify’s recent version 9.1.54.1258 update, we’re getting a peek at how far along this effort has come. While it’s still not quite ready to go live, text strings in the app now start to shine a little more light on how name changes are going to work:
<string name="edit_profile_social_handle_not_editable_dialog_message">You can only change your username twice within 14 days.</string>As you can see, Spotify intends to implement some minor rate limiting on username changes. The restriction doesn’t seem too onerous, based on what we’ve found here, and presumably you’d be free to change your name again once those two weeks are up.
That’s only the half of our finds for today, though, and in addition to that username customization, it looks like Spotify could also be getting ready to greatly expand access to bios. Right now, bios aren’t really a user feature at all — artists can set their own bios, but so far there hasn’t been anything like that for individual listeners. Based on all these new strings we’re seeing in this update, though, that feels like it’s getting ready to change:
<string name="edit_bio_placeholder">Add a short bio</string>
<string name="edit_bio_page_title">Edit bio</string>
<string name="edit_bio_who_can_see_header">Who can see your bio</string>
<string name="edit_bio_visibility_everyone_subtitle">Anyone on Spotify can see your bio.</string>
<string name="edit_bio_visibility_everyone_title">Everyone</string>
<string name="edit_bio_visibility_friends_subtitle">Anyone you have a chat with in Messages can see your bio.</string>
<string name="edit_bio_visibility_friends_title">Friends</string>In addition to letting users write and edit their bios, the app’s also preparing to empower users to set who’s able to see them: anybody else on Spotify, or only people you’re friends with.
Admittedly, this feels like pretty basic stuff — but it’s also been something just so utterly lacking from Spotify entirely, that we’re excited to see the app finally making real progress towards doing something about it. We’re still not sure exactly when any of this may go live, so we’ll keep an eye on future updates for any further signs of progress.
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