Spotify is giving premium users a new feature that’ll allow them to share DJ duties with anyone in their immediate vicinity. Group Sessions, as Spotify is calling the feature, is rolling out in beta today and only works between premium users.
A host can share a scannable Spotify code from their app with whomever they want to share playback control, meaning that the host and guests can pause, play, skip, and select tracks in the queue, and add their own picks to the list. The queue will update on everyone’s devices, and sessions will end after an hour of inactivity. Spotify doesn’t seem to have put a cap on the number of users who can join a session but it tells The Verge it will “continue to evolve the experience over time based on user feedback.”
This is a small, but incremental perk for premium users. Spotify’s slowly built additional features for its paying users, like allowing them to hide songs from playlists, in an effort to make the paid tier more appealing. In the past, it also offered free Hulu and a Google Home Mini to premium members. People likely won’t subscribe for any one feature, but in the aggregate, the more the team can offer these users, the more likely they are to pay.
