Spotify Tastebuds: Listening to Music gets more social

Spotify has introduced a new feature called “Tastebuds” to bring back its lost social features. Currently, Tastebuds is in the prototype phase, but when this feature arrives in the mobile app, users will be able to explore the music taste of their friends.

Tech enthusiasts have noted that Spotify was intentionally barring social features to pressurize users to rely on the company’s own playlists and discovery surfaces. And this gave Spotify the spotlight and exercise control over artists who got featured and rose to prominence. Having control over playlist helps Spotify negotiate with the record labels who are worried if their artists will be left out of playlists if they do not get along with Spotify and thus they will have to give in to sustainable royalty rates.

The new feature was first discovered by a reverse engineering specialist Jane Manchun Wong and provided details on how the feature works. Spotify‘s description on the Tastebuds section of website read “Now you can discover music through friends whose taste you trust.”

Spotify had previously experimented with few other social features but never launched any. But Tastebuds has the potential to be a unique feature that can extend to users with more than just a snapshot of their friend’s playlists. But it provides them with a better understanding of what their friend has been jamming to lately and get to know more about their music preferences overall.