Changes to Friend Activity

[Hubo]

With Friend Activity you can see what your friends are listening to. Personally, I love Friend Activity because I can really get to know my friends’ tastes in music and dive right into what they’re listening to.

As of recently, if you want to continue sharing what you're listening to, you will need to enable it for your followers in Settings. If you’ve never turned this setting on before, you’ll need to turn it on to share your activity with your followers. This way, you’re always in control of what you’re sharing.

Also, you may find that you don't see much activity from those you follow - that's because they might not have turned this setting on yet. Let them know you want to dig in on the cool stuff they're listening to! 

Check out this article for more information about Friend Activity. 

You can also block followers if you don’t want them to view your listening activity. Check out the steps under: ‘Block someone’ here for more information.

[user-removed]

from mistreating artists to customers? what are we paying for? torture?! if you wanna be stubborn don't cry if we keep going on about it! oh, lemme remind you about the controversy with artists a few years ago, i guess fame does change people to worse, and guess what? you're gonna be forced to revert it one day as we're not paying to be humiliated!

[nikolaydl]

I became a paid subscriber, just because of the Friend Activity. Now that this feature doesn't work like it used to, I have no reason to stay. I had many people on my "Friend Activity" tab, now there are only two. What is the advantage of Spotify over other streaming platforms right now? I'm moving back to Apple Music.

[LouisDavis]

That response just makes the situation even worse. So instead of Spotify notifying all members of the change, you decided to ignore millions of regular users because they follow and are followed by their friends but notified celebs and those with large followings. It's called "Friend Activity" and yet you ignore those most likely to be being followed by their friends.

What's more you give the excuse that you couldn't notify members because of their account settings which makes sense except for the fact that Spotify had no issue going in and changing people's settings without their permission with this update. This feature has been around for years. Spotify has no clue how many millions of users may have seen that setting defaulted to on in the past and been happy to leave it as it is, but now Spotify has changed their setting without permission. That is a huge violation of trust and overreach by Spotify regardless of what the setting actually enables. This should've been a default change for all new accounts but left alone for existing members for the reason I just explained.

Almost every week users are notified of new albums or playlist or Spotify Wrapped! through popups and notifications on the mobile, web, and desktop apps, and yet Spotify decided not to utilise this functionality to let everyone know about this setting change or to draw attention so Spotify didn't need to go in an change people's settings without permission. This is all made worse by the fact that Spotify is now expecting its users to advertise its features to their friends rather than them doing it themselves.

[user-removed]

they sent me a notification to compare my wrapped with someone else's, i'm already chatting with them about it and so far i was transferred to 3 different individuals

[Alex]

@LouisDavis,

We know our response and decision won't make everyone happy, but we are doing our best to be transparent and provide more details.

We would like to point out that you've picked specific parts of our response while not paying attention to others. Your post also includes speculations and implications.

For everyone involved we would recommend and ask to focus on constructive feedback based off of the current situation and the fact that we will not be reverting the change.

For example, it has been very helpful to hear your feedback to increase awareness and as mentioned we will be looking into this.

We welcome any other helpful opinions, but if the thread is used solely for complaints, rather than anything constructive, we on our end will not be able to do much else to act upon your feedback.

[user-removed]

rather than justifying your mistake, fix the problem! That's all we're asking for!!!!!

[john2693]

i not agree with this at all, sorry .

[user-removed]

i spoke to 8 agents today(if not more) one of them told me she'll take my complaint personal(not sure if that's hogwash) the others told me how to reactivate it(which i already knew how to) and one of them was like a stuck record, we have to find a way to crash spotify's server

[mrhsfan]

So you don't want to send emails to "millions of users" about a change to a major feature, but you have NO problem sending emails about new artist, new features and whatever else you want to brag about with your service? You send out emails to us EVERY DAY. Why not send one out to alert us of a feature change? That makes zero sense.

[ThomasTTE]

@mrhsfan - those can be opted out from in the account settings I think. But I kinda get it why they don't want to send another one out. I mean look, you're saying they send all those emails and you seem annoyed by it. Would you even read an email? A lot of folks probably also don't know they can turn them off. And if you do, then it doesn't matter again, as they can't send them. I'll just let my friends know. It sounds like it'll be what needs to happen now

[arsmir]

I get the privacy concerns, but this should be a reciprocal relationship. If someone goes private and does not share their music they should not be allowed to view others who chose to share. 

This change should have been more well thought out and unfortunately punishes those that share and those that can't be bothered to share and yet are privy to the music others listen to.

Please consider rewarding those who share by viewing others activities and those who don't should not be able to view the friends feed.

[user-removed]

@ThomasTTE we cannot sedate to them and let them win against us, we have to keep going

[LouisDavis]

Every point I made is based on your comments or those made by other Spotify moderator accounts on other threads.

I am drawing attention to the issue with how Spotify has gone about this change. Regardless of the good intentions of this change, and I do agree that the default should always have been in the off position, Spotify cannot be allowed to just go in and change people's settings without their permission and then not inform them of the change, whatever the setting may be and however many followers the user may have. One of the main points I am trying to make and would reiterate is that based off other moderator comments, this change was only made to those who have never changed their toggle, but that doesn't take into account any user who has ever seen the toggle but left it because they are happy with it.

Spotify hasn't addressed the actual issue here which is that users didn't know they could toggle this feature, off or on. And has failed to make any UI changes to rectify that.

They could put the toggle in the actual friend activity for example and make it more clear whether or not they're sharing their music or not. They could've shown a notification in the app itself which should not be an issue with whether the user had enabled push or email notifications. They could've put it in the profile drop-down menu alongside the private session button which to be honest could be combined into a singular toggle option as they serve the same but opposite purpose.

There are so many ways Spotify could've gone about this differently.

[arsmir]

Merge "See what your friends are playing" with "Share my listening activity on Spotify"! This would be a better step in the right direction. You reward those that share and want to share, and at the same time respect the privacy of those that don't want to share.

It creates an incentive to share music with others, one of the biggest features of Spotify. Those that wish to listen to music privately should not be privy to the listening activity of those that share, this is an unfair and non-reciprocal relationship. (you punish those of us that make this platform better by sharing).

Please consider this change as a better step in the right direction.
Thank you

[user-removed]

i was thinking, if listening is now set to private why do some people share tracks on instagram? 🤔

[3b]

man got ratio'd

[user-removed]

we need to escalate this guys

[dreαmlαnd]

disappointed. completely and utterly disappointed. 

never seen anyone complain about using this feature and now there’s a riot happening. clearly spotify  are just overlooking this and not realising that this feature ACTUALLY made using the app, worthwhile. 

to the moderators: explain to me how are we supposed to REACH OUT TO PEOPLE WHO WE DONT KNOW IN REAL LIFE AND TELL THEM TO SWITCH IT BACK ON?! 

thsi isn’t a privacy issue. it’s JUST MUSIC!!!  

it has helped many many people find new songs just by following people. i don’t see the “privacy reasons” behind it or a “safety” issue…. 

this is all just bogus!!! 

spotify is cancelled!!!! expect to LOSE a lot of your  premium users and as well as non premium users. this is bull!!! 

[dreαmlαnd]

“ In the end, it's personal data which by default should not be shared (unless someone chooses to).”

maybe you should’ve started this off years ago when you developed the app. or over the next couple of months …. not a decade later !!!! stupid and pointless

[joopeeds]

I am very mad that I have not been notified of this change. Why do you think you have the permission to change my settings?