Spotify Premium subscribers can listen to shared playlist in real time

Music streaming service Spotify is releasing a feature called Group Sessions starting this week. This allows Premium subscribers in the mobile app to collaborate on a shared playlist and listen to it in real time.

The feature allows two or more paying Premium users to manage the music to be played. As far as is known, there is no limit on the number of participants, although Spotify tells The Verge that it will continue to develop the feature based on user feedback.

It works by sharing a scannable code, which is shared by the host. The invited other participants can scan that code, after which everyone can play, pause or skip songs via the Spotify interface. Songs can also be added to or removed from the playlist. All changes are immediately visible in real-time to all participants.

In any case, the function has been tested since May last year. For example, there was already a part within Spotify that allowed users to share their favorite music, but that had the limitation that the shared management was not done in real-time.

Group Sessions will be made available worldwide to all Premium mobile users. This is also a beta feature. Whether and when the option will also come to the desktop versions of Spotify is unknown.

In the past, Spotify had a somewhat similar feature called Rooms. This meant that the same playlist could be played in several rooms and everyone could always hear the same music at the same time, as if it were a radio station. It was also possible to vote for songs and get music higher in the queue if several people contributed the same song.