- Spotify rolls out Track Reactions for Collaborative Playlists
- This lets you react to songs added by other members from a selection of six emojis
- It’s rolling out in select markets now, but Spotify hasn’t said which ones
One of Spotify’s most useful tools is Collaborative Playlists, which allow you and your friends to work together to assemble songs into one monster playlist – now they’re getting a new upgrade that makes them even more interactive.
The top music streaming service shared on a community page that it is rolling out Track Reactions, which is basically a feature that lets you use emojis to react to songs added to your Collaborative Playlists.
Spotify says the tool will roll out over the coming weeks in select markets to free and premium users 16 and older, though we don’t know which markets will come first.
Like emoji reactions on platforms like Facebook Messenger, it works the same way, giving you a choice of six; a plain red heart, a laughing face, a thumbs-up, headphones, fire and an emotional face. When you post a reaction, it appears next to the track name, and you can see the reactions added by other collaborators on the playlist.
The addition of Track Reactions means that Collaborative Playlists will now look a little different than before. The profile picture of playlist collaborators now appears on the song thumbnail, indicating which member added which song, and now the track reaction icon has taken its place to the right of a song title next to the three-dot button.
Track reactions are automatically enabled in collaborative playlists that have 10 or fewer members, and only the people in the playlist can see them, meaning external viewers won’t be able to see which songs have which reactions. You also don’t have to stick with them if you don’t want to – the playlist’s creator can disable track reactions in the playlist’s name and details settings.
We’re going through a time where most of Spotify’s new tools rely on the powers of AI, most recently its two new AI features for podcasts, so Track Reactions feels like a reminder that Spotify do has human elements to its user experience.
When it comes to Collaborative Playlists, I mainly use them to create playlists with friends for get-togethers and other social events (we have an annual summer meeting, so the tool comes in really handy there). Now that Spotify has thrown Track Reactions into the mix, I can’t see it being used for anything other than judging each other’s song choices – and I’m actually okay with that.
Emoji reactions are a commonly used feature among my friends across our strip of group chats, whether it’s to respond to silly texts on Facebook Messenger or reply to unhinged videos we send each other on TikTok. It will be no different in the case of Spotify, and hopefully it will encourage more conversations about the music we are currently listening to.
So far, the emoji options are very limited and don’t quite represent a wide range of emotions – they all seem to be pretty positively inclined, with the exception of the emotional face emoji, which is often used to represent sadness or that feeling of ‘smiling through the pain’. To really take it to the next level, the choice to use custom emojis would open the floodgates for users to be even more expressive, or in my case, seriously more judgmental.
Track reactions are locked into the Collaborative Playlist experience at the moment, and Spotify has yet to announce any plans to expand it to other playlist-making tools. We’ve reached out to Spotify for more details on this, as well as which markets will get access first, so we’ll update this story when we know more.
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