World’s one of the leading music streaming service provider Spotify is prototyping a new way to discover what friends have been listening to, called “Tastebuds.” This new tool is designed to let users explore the music taste profiles of their friends.
Tastebuds is offered through a navigation option alongside Library and Home/Browse sections. Anyone can access a non-functioning landing page for the feature at https://open.spotify.com/tastebuds. The feature explains itself, with text noting “What’s Tastebuds? Now you can discover music through friends whose taste you trust.”
Without Tastebuds, there are only a few ways to interact socially on Spotify. You can message friends a piece of music through buttons for SMS, Facebook Messenger and more, or post songs to your Instagram or Snapchat Story.
Earlier, Spotify used to have an in-app inbox for trading songs, but it was removed by the company in favor of shuttling users to more popular messaging apps. On the desktop app, you can view a Friend Activity ticker of songs your Facebook friends are currently listening to.
Currently, Spotify has no features for directly interacting with friends within its mobile app. There’s a possibility that the company was purposefully restricting social features to force users to rely on its own playlists and discovery surfaces. This enabled Spotify to influence which artists got featured and rose to stardom. This in turn gave it leverage in negotiations with record labels.
