- Spotify is rolling out Track Reactions for collaborative playlists
- This allows you to react to songs added by other members from a selection of six emojis.
- It’s rolling out to select markets now, but Spotify hasn’t said which ones.
One of Spotify’s most useful tools is collaborative playlists, which let you and your friends work together to group songs into one monster playlist; Now they’re getting a new update that makes them even more interactive.
The best music streaming service shared on a community page that is in the process of rolling out Track Reactions, which is essentially a feature that allows you to use emojis to react to songs added to your collaborative playlists.
Spotify says the tool will roll out in the coming weeks in select markets for free and premium users ages 16 and up, though we don’t know which markets will be first.
Like emoji reactions on platforms like Facebook Messenger, it works similarly and lets you choose from six; a standard red heart, a laughing face, a thumbs up, headphones, fire and an emotional face. When you submit a reaction, it appears next to the track name, and you can see reactions added by other collaborators in the playlist.
The addition of Track Reactions means that collaborative playlists will now look slightly different than before. The profile picture of playlist contributors now appears in the song thumbnail indicating which member added which song, and the Track Reaction icon has now taken the place to the right of a song title next to the three-dot button.
Follow reactions are automatically enabled on collaborative playlists that have 10 members or fewer, and only people within the playlist can see them, meaning outside viewers won’t be able to see which songs have which reactions. You don’t have to continue with them if you don’t want to: the playlist creator can turn off Reaction Tracking in the Playlist Name and Details settings.
We’re living 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 does have human elements in your user experience.
When it comes to collaborative playlists, I mostly use them to create playlists with friends for get-togethers and other social events (we have an annual summer get-together, so the tool is really useful there). Now that Spotify has thrown Track Reactions into the mix, I don’t see it being used for anything other than judging others’ song choices, and I’m actually okay with that.
Emoji reactions are a commonly used feature among my friends in our many group chats, whether it’s reacting to silly text messages on Facebook Messenger or responding to crazy videos we send each other on TikTok. It will be no different in the case of Spotify and will hopefully encourage more conversations about the music we currently listen to.
For now, emoji options are very limited and do not represent a wide range of emotions; They all seem to be pretty positive, with the exception of the emotional face emoji, which is often used to represent sadness or that “smiling through the pain” feeling. To really take it to the next level, the option to use custom emojis would open the floodgates for users to be even more expressive or, in my case, much more critical.
Track Reactions is locked into the collaborative playlist experience for now, and Spotify hasn’t yet announced any plans to expand it to other playlist creation tools. We’ve reached out to Spotify for more details on this, as well as which markets will have access first, so we’ll update this story when we know more.
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