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.

[CendrePlume]

Hello there, same problem as everyone !
My settings are already ON, I tried to switched it off/on, to restart, to cleaninstall ... nothing work, it's still like this :

* Also yeah, I agree with everyone, it's quite a good idea in terms of privacy but you should warn every user better about it (and not only pc users) so they know why and how to switch it back on.
Still I would found it better to ask explicitly users if they want to switch it on or off with a simple popup like those "agreeing to terms and conditions" things when they install the app instead of some settings deep inside your profile. Or maybe just a on/off switch in your friends activity tab like the Available/DoNotDisturb/Invisible switch on every social thing.

[andrei90]

I understand the reasons why you chose this, but I just want to voice my frustration. I used to see about 7 friends on my 'Friend activity' panel.  Now I see 1. These 6 other people have given me great new music to listen to. 

This essencially kills the social aspect of Spotify, except for public playlists.

[heinzpeterschwa]

Ja das Problem ist mir Bekannt, jedes Land und Ihre Vorschriften bzw. Gesetze kann man allein selbst kaum bewerkstelligen. Aber es muss jeden Bewusst sein genau diese Vorschriften zu akzeptieren, um es den Anbietern zu erleichtern ihre Daten zu Erheben und zu Verarbeiten!

[LanderLander]

Hi Eni,

Unfortunately, I already tried logging out and back in, I even uninstalled and reinstalled the application. My friends did the same and it didn't help.

[Moonpoppet]

Spotify should leave it as it was, ie, default to sharing and then let users choose Private if that's what they want. Spotify is (or at least it was) a social platform with users happy to have their activity shared.
If you don't want to share then select Private. But defaulting to Private is causing problems with most of my friends not appearing in my friend feed yet they appear in others frient activity. What is going on??!
. Defaulting activity to Private is not an improvement it is an irritation... doesn't this thread prove that to Spotify? Why are you digging your heels in and saying it's a 'good step forward' when it quite clearly isnt?? I am really irritated by this and don't see the point in being on Spotify if I can't see my friends activity. Really annoying!

[Moonpoppet]

No I don't understand. I don't want my settings changed by Spotify. This is a social platform... the vast majority of users are therefore happy for the default to be set to 'sharing' NOT 'private'. What's the point in Spotify if you get nothing in your friend feed. Utterly pointless.

[blakeandcamp]

What an absolutely stupid change that will completely kill this functionality. Most people won't even know you've changed it so they won't know they have to go and re-enable it. Did you really not think of that when you implemented this change? 

[glan4321]

Hi Alex.
Firstly, I understand you need to make the change. So we can set that to one side. But I don't feel your statement stand up well to scrutiny. You don't need to send an email to millions of users. All you need to do is place it on the front page of the Desktop app. Perhaps were you place information about new music? Or as a one off pop-up. Then everyone who opens the app will be aware. This seems like a simple and rather obvious solution. But to leave millions users in the dark about the change is not acceptable. How can they make an informed choice if they are unaware of the change? Why not listen to what your users are telling you? This is a big deal for a large proportion of your customers. How many of them are going to go digging around to find out whats going on? At the start of all this I personally went through email support and they just went through the usual process of trying to solve the problem. Yes have been through the process several times in the past. On each occasion there was no solution you just had to wait and a few days later friends would appear again. (I suspect that there are many people are oblivious to the change and thinking just that) At no stage did Spotify support point out the change so they hadn't even been informed! Besides this I don't buy your argument that emails would be considered spam. You are enabling them to make an informed choice. Companies like Google do this all the time to inform people about changes to their set up. For example about security options. For those that have opted out of you contacting them that is their choice but you would have done all that you could to inform everyone. Why wouldn't you do that?

[Saigone]

It's annoying.

[Elena]

Hey @LanderLander!

Thanks for getting back to us with this info.

We've received more reports about this and we're currently looking further into it.

You can keep an eye for updates on our investigation here.

Let us know if there's anything else we can do for you and have a great weekend!

[AnaStone]

This annoys me too

[dreαmlαnd]

still wanting to know the REAL reason as to why this happened.. i don’t believe it was because of “privacy concerns”… was it about money or something

with christmas and new years and possibly another lockdown in the works - i’m going to go stir crazy if this feature isn’t reverted. it helped me through soo much in the lonely months and hard times…

why can’t you see how much this stupid update is affecting people? 

[technomupet67]

No I do not understand. It is an unnecessary change that removes features that are loved by many without bringing any new improvements. A complete waste of resources from a business point of view. Providing features that customers have not asked for at the same time as removing features that people love, is not a good decision if you seek customer loyalty.

Bring back your differentiator quickly or disappear in a sea of online music providers

[beef99]

I don't want this to be enabled by default. I like that it is defaulted to off. I do NOT like that my setting was changed to off when I was using it. I did not grant permission to spotify to change my settings.

Send out a notification in app it's that simple.

The reason for the change is likely due to some impending law or extra scrutiny on what user data is shared or even maybe it wasn't disclosed in their terms of service that your listening activity would be shared. The change is almost certainly to protect themselves from legal action of some sort which is where the financial part comes into play which is as we all know the only motivator for anyone at all anymore.

It's rather funny that they faced this same backlash when they turned the sharing on as they are now while turning off.

Just share the information....  I use the desktop app and my friends have been slowly disappearing for a week or so and there was no way for me to find the information in this thread until I went and started googling. That's pathetic, imagine being a massively profitable company and not even knowing how to contact your customers to tell them you are about to mess up their settings and effectively disable a gigantic feature.

I guess all I'm saying is that I agree with this change but it has opened my eyes to some (more) big issues with spotify as a company. It was handled poorly and its been around 2 weeks with no improvements. 

To me that kind of turn around time and lack of communication about the whole thing makes me heavily question the value of the service and whether or not I'll continue to pay for premium. there's plenty of other competitors and they all have the same music. I don't really need a spotify branded window to pull music through.....

[dreαmlαnd]

praying this update is reverted back to normal by new year. i honestly don’t think i’ll be able to cope without it during my next lockdown … 

[Veragrom]

this is really awful. please change it back. it took me TWO HOURS of chatting with your staff, i deinstalled and reinstalled my app several times, i cleared my cache, logged in and off, restarted my PC - until they told me about the change (turns out that was the issue all along). i'm not blaming your staff, they thought it was a technical issue as well.

from all the 25+ friends i follow i can only see 3. i asked some of ny friends to turn the feature on again and they did and NOTHING CHANGED. because whatever you did completely broke the feature. seeing what my friends listen to made me very happy and was my fav feature of spotify. the least you could do is send everyone an email or give a quick notification when they first logg in after the change happened.

rip friends feed, you'll be dearly missed.

[Douxie]

I've already stated that I'm not thrilled with the recent update (please reverse it, thank you), but it is bizarre how out of sync shared listening has become? I have noticed that if someone is currently listening to music it won't always display it on the feed (With share my listening activity turned on) and if it does it isn't the song they're actually listening to (I'm aware there was always a slight delay, but it won't update and will continue displaying the same song for hours). I have performed all of the suggestions to fix this, but it's still super finicky and doesn't work as well as it did prior to the update. Hopefully, there will be another update soon that improves upon the feature as opposed to unintentionally destroying it.

[Azería]

I have always had my activity shared and wanted to share it. However I wake up this morning, and spotify no longer displays anything in my friend activity. It tells me to enable share my listening activity and to go to settings. Which I naturally do, and it is ticked in, but nevertheless it wont stop showing the same thing.

I have cleared my cache, logged in and out. Enabled/disabled it couple of times. Also done so on mobile to try and resync any settings. All without results.

Please help?

[kpwxx]

Shared a similar post in another thread but afterwards found this one, which seems more appropriate.

Has there been another update to this? Yesterday I could see friend activity from all my friends, and today I can see it from none. It seems unlikely that all of them didn't install the update a few weeks ago, and then suddenly all did on exactly the same day. It seems more likely that there is some kind of issue with it not showing activity of friends even when they have it shared, which others seem to be reporting. I've asked some friends to confirm that their setting is turned on so I can check this. EDIT: I have confirmed that I have friends who have it turned on but I still can't see their activity.

Regardless, I agree that this is not a good change. The logic that if people didn't explicitly turn it on before they probably want it off is flawed... because if they went to the settings before, it was on by default, so why would they turn it off and on again - they wouldn't because it's already on! So now many people who have consciously checked the setting and opted to leave it turned on, will suddenly have it turned off without realising. Having the setting off by default for new users, or from the time the app was released, is one thing, and I can certainly see an argument for that. But changing it without properly notifying users is completely different.

Also as a related note, it's very annoying that if no friend activity is shown, the bar instead shows a constant message to adjust your own settings. It would be better if the bar just minimised if none of your friends chose to share their activity, or at least displayed a message like "No recent activity to show", rather than telling me to turn on a setting that's already turned on.

[sentthelocation]

I realise you need to be consent-compliant but I don't understand why you aren't actively trying to pull users back into the social aspect of Spotify by at least making it easy for them to give that consent. There's posts all over the internet of people wondering why the feed is broken. You say you don't think its worth sending a million emails but just make it an in-app popup? This is the most reasonable approach yet you ignore it, which leads me to believe you don't want people engaging with Friends Activity? If Apple music ever gets their social aspect in order people will swap in an instant, people feel absolutely zero loyalty to a **bleep**ing steaming platform so why would you CONSCIOUSLY prohibit people from engaging with the one thing that sets you apart from other platforms? It's the same as the Wrapped situation this year. People loved sharing their playlists but you **bleep**ed it up by making it a different type of object, so now the link just directs to your personal playlist. Why wouldn't you fix that? Are spotify engineers incompetent or are you just out of touch with your users?