In context: As its music streaming war with Apple Music continues on, Spotify is constantly trying to keep a step ahead of the Cupertino tech giant. This means frequently adding features even if they only turn out to be experimental. A new tool will apparently allow users to find new music based on their friends' musical tastes.
Spotify has a new feature coming that lets users explore new music options through their friends’ preferences. The mode is called Tastebuds in a tongue-in-cheek reference to finding music that your friends enjoy, in other words, your buds’ taste in music.
The new feature was found by app researcher Jane Manchun Wong by reverse-engineering the web-based player. Not much is known about the tool since it has not officially been announced, but a placeholder page is already up on the Open Spotify player.
The page says, “Now you can discover music through friends whose taste you trust.”
Spotify is working on Tastebuds, letting users discover music through their friends pic.twitter.com/uqUXmRvEKo
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) December 18, 2019
A pen icon on the page brings up a search window presumably to find friends that you follow to view their most played songs, but it did not seem to be working. Most likely because the feature is not live yet. The tool should appear as a new tab in the sidebar of the web app.
For the most part, sharing music through Spotify has been facilitated through social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. This required the active participation of users posting playlists or favorite songs via their external accounts.
Spotify does have an Activity Feed, but this is limited to the desktop app. Your friends also have to have sharing enabled in their settings. The company did consider adding an in-app messenger for swapping music from within the app but canceled development on the project.
The dummy page for Tastebuds did not provide any clues as to when the feature would be made available as a beta or any other form. We’ll have to wait until Spotify decides it is ready for the wild before we can learn more.
Image credit: Ascannio via Shutterstock
