Listening to music on Spotify is about to get more interactive through a new feature called Group Sessions. Group sessions will allow two or more Premium users to take control of a live group playlist.
Through this feature, one can host a group session, then others can join, and all of them would be able to take control of the session. Users in a group session can play, pause, skip, and even add tracks to an existing shared queue.
Using the Group sessions feature needs one user who will act as a host, and then others can join via a scannable code that will be shared by the app. Streaming is in sync, so playlists will be updated in real-time as any member of the group adds/removes a song to or from the queue.
Although the feature has gone global, the company says it’s still in beta. So, expect more features on this front in the future. For now, Group sessions does its job as advertised and will allow up to 100 users, which is an overkill of sorts.
However, there are two limitations here; the first one is that you must be a premium subscriber. Typically Spotify Premium costs $9.99 a month. The family plans which support up to six users goes for $14.99.
Secondly, users must be physically in the same location because the code has to be scanned manually.
But apart from Group sessions, you’ll be happy to hear about another feature which has been available on Spotify for quite some time; Collaborative playlists. Spotify’s collaborative playlist feature lets both you and your friends add, delete, and reorder the tracks in a playlist. This can be a perfect companion if you’re quarantining from different locations, but it falls short of the active syncing capability.
