Desktop: Jam now available

[MattSuda]

Spotify is bringing Jam to the desktop app! 🥳 🖥️ 💻

Now you can start or join a listening party with your friends, family, colleagues, and classmates, with the Spotify desktop app in addition to the mobile app.

Although you can listen on your own, Jam in the desktop app offers you the ability to share a synced listening experience in real time with other people remotely or in person. For those people who like to listen when they are working, studying, or relaxing, this is a great way to socialize at the same time. The Jam experience is a much better option than just sharing links to songs or playlists with other people.

Let's Jam! Jam is now rolling out to Premium users using the desktop app.

Jam experience overview:

• Start a Jam: To start a Jam in the desktop app, right click on a song or playlist and select the "Start a Jam" option from the menu. You can also start a Jam by bringing up the same right click menu in the Now Playing View or the Queue in the right sidebar.

• Invite people to the Jam: Once you start a Jam, the Queue will open up in the right sidebar. Other people can participate in the Jam from anywhere in the world remotely. Click on the "Invite" button to copy a link to share with other people. Or, the people with you in person can scan the QR code. Spotify users with Premium will be able to join your Jam remotely and listen on their own audio setup and Spotify users (Free and Premium) will be able join with you in person and listen on your speakers. Free users can join an in person Jam using the mobile app.
  
  
• Join a Jam: You can join a Jam in the desktop app via a link shared by someone else. When you click to open a Jam invite link in your web browser, you should see a pop up that allows you to open the link in the Spotify desktop app. Once you open the link in the desktop app, you will see a pop up to join the Jam.
  
  
• Shared playback in real time: Everyone will experience a synced listening session in real time. Any participant can add to the Queue. Any participant can also change what is playing during the Jam session by clicking on a song, playlist, album, or podcast from anywhere in the app. The Jam host has the option to turn off the ability for the other participants to change what's playing, but they will still be able to add to the Queue. The Queue can be edited at any time.

The new Queue experience:

As part of this update, the Queue now opens up in the right sidebar. The Queue now being in the right sidebar allows you to browse content in the main area of the app while keeping an eye on what's playing next or the current Jam that you are participating in. When you are participating in a Jam, the Jam options will appear at the top of the Queue in the right sidebar. You can switch back to the Now Playing View or Friend Activity feed at any time by pressing the buttons that open them.

You can read more info about Jam in the Spotify Newsroom post:

➜ Spotify Unveils Jam, a New, Personalized Way to Listen With Your Entire Squad

You can get more help with using Jam with the support article:

➜ Spotify Support Article: Jam

FAQ:

This section will answer your frequently asked questions and will be updated with the latest answers.

I don't see the option to start or join a Jam when using the Web Player in the web browser? Is Jam supported in the Web Player?

• Unfortunately, the Jam experience is currently only available in the desktop app for Premium users. You can download the desktop app here if your device is supported. When you click to open a Jam invite link in your web browser, you should see a pop up that allows you to open the link in the Spotify desktop app. Once you open the link in the desktop app, you will see a pop up to join the Jam.

I don't see the "Add songs" button in the Queue to go to the Group Recommendations section like I can in the mobile app. Is this available in the desktop app?

• The "Add songs" button in the Queue to go to Group Recommendations is currently not available in the desktop app. Participants can use the mobile app to add Group Recommendations to the Queue.

Feedback:

Where can I give my feedback about the Jam experience and Queue sidebar in the desktop app?

• We welcome your feedback about the new desktop update. The best way to share your feedback is to comment here in this thread.

[Oscar]

The queue change is a terrible update that no one asked for. Stop forcing these "updates" on us. The new UI crams the queue, hiding the information we want to see (song length, album name, etc). Don't you see that you're alienating your power users? And you don't even have a "Play next" option. Ridiculous.

[phil-baines]

Please consider adding the "Start a Jam" button to the Connect menu. I spent far too long looking for it there, as that's where it is on the mobile UI. It's simple good UI design to be consistent between mobile and desktop whenever you can. 

Another good idea would be to include "Start a jam" at the top of the "Queue", since that's where the controls for managing a jam appear when one is active. You should be able to start it here also. 

[erock_c]

Just another example of a tech company changing things for the sake of changing them.  When they have nothing else constructive to add, they change the interface so they can say they're doing something.  Adobe did this with Acrobat, and the community universally HATES the new UI.  This is a similar example.  And I was just admiring how long it's been since a Spotify change has upended my user experience.  I guess I can reset that clock now.

[Snorfle]

Thanks I absolutely hate it.  Is there a way to show the album and track length on the new queue view?  I'm just using the web player version for now as it mercifully has not changed yet.

[alexjamesbutler]

Hi! I would like to echo everyone's sentiments about the latest change: using the Queue feature centre-pane was great, and a big part of how I worked with lining up songs for a day (I am the office DJ essentially haha. No we don't want to 'Jam').

I could browse Playlists, Albums, Artists etc in them main pane, and if/when I ever needed to pull up what was going to come in next I just clicked one button in the bottom right—the Queue button—and had access to a lot of information. Squishing it in the corner now has lost that information, including having to now toggle between either what is currently playing and what's next.

These UI re-arrangements are not wanted for me and it seems hundreds of others who have voiced their concerns—let alone surely thousands or tens of thousands who haven't!

Please at least give us the option in the Preferences to choose how we would like to arrange this!! I literally restarted Spotify today thinking it had opened with a bug when things were not acting as they used to—all without me actually CONFIRMING I would like to download/install an update that made that change!

[idkidc123]

PLEASE change it back, I will never use the jam feature

[ChrisV_313]

This has become so irritating I just stopped using Spotify altogether. I'm exhausted with the UI changes. As others have said, Pandora has a two-month trial which I've currently switched to. Tidal is also good if you are looking for hi-fi quality. 
If Spotify gives us back the old queue before end of billing cycle i'll stick with it. Who else is feeling the pull to leave? 

[Jezza717]

How is this getting worse?! 

On top of not being able to see friend activity and the now playing at the same time,  I now also can't see the queue at the same time anymore. The left and middle plane are so underused now that so many features are being moved to the right hand plane. These changes are very annoying and are making the user experience worse.

[Ataliano]

The Queue complains have mostly been shared already, there's a lot of features lost due to this "update" that feels somehow a "downgrade" 😔

But focusing on the Jam experience. I'd found it way more intuitive if Jam was represented by a "group" icon where the "Now playing view", "Queue" & "Connect to a device" is. Once I saw the new pop-up announcing Jam for desktop is here, I went straight and clicked "Start a Jam" (nothing happened), then I had to figure out how the **bleep** would I create a Jam (at some moment I was confused thinking the pop-up came before the actual feature had been released 😅). Only after searching in Google found this article and figured out I need to right-click a song or playlist to create one (that's pretty weird IMO, I get the point of pre-filling a list for the Jam, but wouldn't ever had thought of looking on a right-click menu for such a feature).

Instead, I was looking and expecting to have a new icon somewhere representing the Jam (i.e. a group users icon), where I'd click to start one and simply drag & drop a playlist or songs to it. Also when a Jam is running we have yet another bar at the bottom now, whilst the icon could simply highlight to indicate it's on:

[BBnet3000]

I used to always leave the Now Playing sidebar and the queue visible at the same time. Now the largest center portion of my screen is filled with whatever random thing I was browsing last, or a static homepage, rather than a useful view.

[TheCyberWrecker]

Just curious but has there been any updates from Spotify about the queue change? Like if they'll change it back or something?

[gabrhahn]

this new pc/desktop queue experience is horrible. bring back the old queue experience.

[hayzer]

Please consider adopting this idea I have come up with regarding fixing the issues people are having with the new queue system.

[zebramanXY]

I don´t need or want Jam.

Could you please provide the old view option for the queue,

to see what songs are already checked and amongst my favorites?

Like it was before.

Thx.

[emilia4994]

"We welcome your feedback about the new desktop update. The best way to share your feedback is to comment here in this thread." 

Man, I really hope u mean that because you have dozens of mostly negative responses here (as well as more unofficial complaints on Reddit, app store reviews, and online forums). Get the memo that this update has, for the most part, NOT BEEN WELL RECEIVED by your users (aka the people who PAY for your services) to try to have a pleasant listening experience, regardless of the platform. It makes no sense that you're trying to make the desktop UI more similar to that of a mobile, TikTok-ized UI. And this is what this new update is eventually trying to get at with all this newly introduced, unsolicited invasive micro-content everywhere, interrupting (at best) or completely removing (at worst) the features and content that are actually of interest to users. 

It fails massively. 

Not only is it ridiculous to think that a phone UI will fit a computer, but also, this new update is so poorly executed that it makes me wonder if your engineers actually use the application or understand user experience to begin with. It's not so hard to understand. Your users have valued Spotify's clean and tidy appearance, speed, and relatively friendly user interface for years. You've thrown all that down the drain with these new updates. I'd like to particularly focus on this "new queue experience" and the incredibly intrusive "now playing panel" introduced in June last year, both of which replace the useful "friend activity panel" that rests on the right. While the "now playing panel" update came out about a year ago, I believe, UI-wise, it shares a lot in common with the current update, including a ton of overwhelmingly negative feedback that, let it be said, has been completely ignored by Spotify despite their friendly attempts to make u feel heard. See it for yourselves; I've scanned the entire thread and even left a comment myself, and still nothing, not even an acknowledgment: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Desktop-New-quot-Now-Playing-View-quot-sidebar/td-p.... So maybe, just maybe, you can listen to it now again. 

 Let me just summarize some of the incredibly annoying, frustrating, useless, and redundant aspects of these new things: 

- To begin with, these changes are incredibly unfriendly. For years, users have grown used to very useful features in the desktop application: things so small but so convenient that they made the listening, sharing, and playlist-building experience very, very pleasant. Or having an option to minimize or expand the album art at the bottom left corner. Or things like clicking said album art and being directed to the album or playlist the song is currently playing, often showing on the screen the exact position the song is at (which came particularly handy for locating where in a very long playlist or compilation a song came from). I cannot tell you enough how useful I found these features. And in the past year, they're just simply gone, replaced by the "listen now panel" and "expanded queue view" that literally no one asked for... and your team hasn't uttered a word of support or clarified these decisions further, despite your user base's overwhelmingly negative reception. Unfriendly. 

- These changes are also completely redundant, especially the "now playing view." There is already a button to access this panel at the bottom right of the screen (the little rectangle with a play triangle next to the lyrics microphone button) ... why have another function (clicking on the album art) that opens the same panel? Even worse, it does so at the expense of the "friend activity" panel most of your users love. Clearly, your engineers missed some basic design principles there. Redundant. Also, keep in mind that we can access pretty much all of the content in the “now playing panel” (i.e., artist info, mech, videos, concert tickets, tour info) by clicking on the artist name link below the album art at the bottom left of the screen. So again, redundant.

- These updates are also buggy/poorly launched. Taking the "now playing panel" as an example again, why have an option in settings that supposedly allows us to disable the feature permanently and then still have this dumb panel appear when we click the album art? It is my understanding that this disabling feature was present when the "now playing panel" was first released almost a year ago. It worked well and allowed folks who didn't like the panel to still have the "old" option to click the album art and go to the corresponding album or playlist the song was in (albeit it was still quite buggy/stubborn for some users). But now that option is completely gone. Clicking on the album art will ALWAYS open the "now playing panel. So, WHY ON EARTH, do you still keep the option to disable this panel on settings if, as things are right now, it’s impossible to disable. Why trick your users like this with a function that now serves no purpose? Additionally, both features, the "now playing panel" and "expanded queue view," have made the UI so slow because of how much content they're trying to get across. The app is more slow, sluggish, and poorly responsive because of it. Buggy/poorly launched features. 

- Finally, I think these new features have very questionable design changes. For the “now playing panel,” as it’s been said many times, we don’t like seeing all this content in this tiny column on the right of the screen. I get that u must pay the bills with sponsored info/merch, but at least make these new introductions aesthetically and UI sound. Why does that monetizable content now have to occupy ¼ to half of the panel? This leaves relatively little space for the album and the “about the artist” section of the panel. This latter one is even more frustrating because it holds a relatively large picture of whatever the artist has chosen as a “profile image,” which I think is completely useless. Moreover, it’s succeeded by, I kid you not, 3 lines of text so narrow that there are rarely more than 6 words per line. So, yeah, the “about the artist” section of the “now playing panel” has a useless/redundant photo and 3 lines of text that barely add up to a complete sentence. HOW ON EARTH is that good design… like… honestly? The “new queue experience” feature also suffers from similar limitations. Having the entire queue crammed into the tiny right corner is NOT a good design. Sure, you can see the queue with a tiny album art (useless imo), but you can’t see which album or playlist the song is in or how long the songs are, which are things you could do when the queue was accessed via the large, middle panel of the app. Both pieces of info, I don’t know about y’all, are quite important to me when putting together or modifying queues. If, for some reason, u wanna argue that having the queue on the right while simultaneously having other content in the center pane will help you build a queue by dragging and dropping content from the middle to the right panel… well, let me tell you that’s not the case. Like, logically, this is the only thing I can think about that could justify this ghastly design change, but NO. They didn’t even think of that. Spotify, if you can’t even do that, then restore the option to have the queue appear in the center panel and simply let us toggle between the queue content and the regular content using the queue button. Again, it’s not that hard! Finally, for both the “now playing panel” and the “new queue experience,” activating them automatically replaces the more default useful “friend activity” panel we all love. What’s even more annoying is that closing the “now playing panel” and the “new queue experience” does not automatically restore the “friend activity” panel. Further, the button to restore the “friend activity” panel is at the TOP right, while the buttons to open the “now playing panel” and the “new queue experience” are on the BOTTOM right. I mean… if “friend activity” is not a default anymore and rather something that we have to actively open (such as the “now playing panel” and the “new queue experience”), then wouldn’t it make sense to have all those buttons together in the same place? Like, if these three things are now basically under the same new category, “things u can add to your right,” why aren’t the buttons to open them in the same area? Just saying… Again, questionable design choices.

Sorry for the long post, but it’s just perplexing how seemingly so little thought went into some of the most basic aspects of these two new features. And yes, perhaps we took the old Spotify with its cool subtle features for granted, but suddenly having them gone has made UI much less enjoyable and, yes, **bleep** off a lot of us. But we are voicing that. We are giving you the feedback you so nicely request and yet choose to ignore. If you haven’t done so in almost a year (ahem, “now playing panel”), please do so now!

Thanks

PS: For reference, here are the official Spotify support threads as of today on these two (and, perhaps most importantly, Spotify's ghosting of each of them)

– The "Now playing panel" original thread is that I've linked above in the main text. It was opened in June 2023 and has 230+ feedback comments, most of them negative. No intervention from Spotify other than to clarify punctual things to a confused user at the very beginning of the thread. 

- A Live Ideas thread for the "new queue experience:" https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Return-expanded-queue-view-not-only-sidebar-for-desktop-.... Started 3 weeks ago, has over 50 comments, 250+ upvotes, most of them agreeing that the old queue view was better. No comments from Spotify. 

- A help thread for the "new queue experience: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Why-was-the-queue-moved-to-the-right-instead-of-the.... Started 3 weeks ago, has over 80 comments, most of them agreeing that the old queue view was better. No comments from Spotify.

[Keimpe_Rauwerda]

I just wanted to share a new possibility we discovered.

Apparently since one of the recent updates the ability to add local files to the spotify queue in the "Jam" feature has been added. I know for a fact this wasn't possible before. It's espacially useful because the other person doesn't need to have the file on their device.

A really good adition from Spotify, and fits well with expected behavior considering when playing songs in a jam It's considered to be played from the account of the person who added it. Really happy with the change. Also the miniplayer added to desktop is awesome (would be nice if you could alter the opacity of it btw).

I know this might not be the best place to post this, but thanks for reading!

[lduerr]

I hate this side queue update with ALL of my being, it bothers me SO much. Please at least provide an update to where users can customize the layout to their preferences. 

[Toothily]

I hate, repeat, HATE the queue being in the sidebar. For the love of dog, let us change it back. Spotify's made a lot of UI changes to the desktop client over the years that I have begrudgingly accepted, but this is the first time I'm actually looking for a way to rollback and block further updates. Good work guys. /s

[bltxl]

Don't point that out! Someone at Spotify is going to see your post and realize their oversite. Quick knock on wood or something. You know they're on the hunt to break things that work and are useful. It's obvious that they don't listen to their ideas page from their community by the ones that have tens of thousands of upvotes and are not on their radar of changes to make. This post on a "new feature" that removed useful functionality is getting ratioed in the comments and they will do nothing about it but turn a blind eye. A recent tech radar article said it best, "It seems like Spotify users live in fear of every new update that is implemented." Unfortunately, I have to learn to use the web version like yourself until they break it. They are clearly unable to make good UI decisions and also unable to allow for choices to toggle features on and off. Every new Spotify feature is a downgrade.

[bltxl]

Spotify users prayer: Lord save us from another UI update. Let things that work remain untouched by the Spotify engineers. Allow the features that I use on a daily basis evade the gaze of the user experience team lest they deem it the next thing to be removed. Amen

Spotify philosophy:

• Make changes no one asks for
• Find something useful and remove it
• Make it harder to use
• Keep users in fear of the next "Upgrade"
• Ignore community ideas with hundreds and even tens of thousands of upvotes to improve the app
• Review all comments on new features - Ignore the overwhelming bad comments
• Review ideas submitted by the community to restore functionality or add options - Ignore them all
• Ignore news articles, reddit comments, comments on app store, social media, and all other overwhelmingly negative comments from the users that pay for and use the service and apps
• Repeat