After launching the messaging feature in August last year, Spotify has just announced that users can create group chats to exchange common listening content.
However, users can only start chatting with people who have shared content before, such as creating collaborative playlists together.
The deployment of group chat shows that Spotify is continuing to move towards "socializing" the content experience, instead of just playing the role of a purely music streaming platform. By allowing users to directly exchange about podcasts, playlists or audiobooks they are listening to, Spotify creates an interactive space around content, where personal preferences can become a topic of connection between many people.
In the context of technology platforms increasingly competing for time and user attention, adding social features is seen as a strategy to keep listeners longer in the ecosystem.
With Spotify, group chat is not just a new utility, but also a step to turn listening to music and audio content into a common, more community-oriented experience.
