Spotify Turns Into a Messenger: New In-App Chat Feature Announced

The music streaming platform Spotify is now becoming a messaging service. The company wants to rely more on the social interaction of its users – and of course make sure that you spend more time in the app. The chat features should help to exchange ideas about music.

Messaging will soon also start in Europe

Spotify has also been used for discovering music for years, with most users usually replace links, albums or podcasts outside the platform. With the messenger integration, the users want to be exchanged in the app themselves, while at the same time a kind of course function is offered so that you do not have to search for songs that have been discussed before.

At the start of the new chat function, discussions can only be held between individual users. The availability is also limited to countries in Latin and South America and is only given in the mobile versions of the Spotify app. In the coming weeks, however, the introduction should also take place in Europe, the USA and other countries.

No full encryption, but chat monitoring

In addition, you can only chat with users with which you have previously shared content. This only applies to users who use a shared playlist or one of the other Sharing functions of Spotify. In addition, the feature also supports chats between users of duo and family subscriptions. There is no simple “exceptional chat” in this context, because as soon as you send a message to another user, it must first agree with the chat.

On request, you can also pass on a link outside of Spotify on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat or Tiktok, which can then be called up by the recipient and used to start a chat request. In his announcement on the new chat function, Spotify stated that the feature should initially be primarily a supplementary nature. The users are therefore expressly asked to continue to share content outside the app.

Access to your own chat messages takes place via the profile picture in the Spotify app. On request, you can also react to individual messages with emojis. Spotify also explained that the messages are transferred between the users in encrypted form, but there is no “end-to-end encryption”. This is based on the company with the fact that the transferred news is monitored by the company “proactively” to possible violations of the terms of use – Spotify therefore scans all messages for regulations. The chat feature also enables individual messages to report to the company if they contain possible violations. If you don’t want to use Spotify’s new chat function, you have to deactivate the option in the app settings.