Spotify is giving its Collaborative Playlists tool a revamp with Track Reactions — now you can judge your friends’ music taste even more by reacting with emojis | Tech Radar
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Spotify's new Track Reactions update gives you yet more ways to judge your friends' music taste in Collaborative Playlists — but I'd like the emoji list to be even more brutal
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Spotify is rolling out Track Reactions for Collaborative Playlists
This lets you react to songs added by other members from a choice of six emojis
It's rolling out in select markets now, but Spotify hasn't said which ones
One of Spotify’s most handy tools are Collaborative Playlists, which allow you and your friends to work together to pool songs into one monster playlist — now they’re getting a new upgrade that makes them even more interactive.
The best music streaming service shared on a community page that it’s in the process of rolling out Track Reactions, which is essentially a feature that lets you use emojis to react to songs added to your Collaborative Playlists.
Spotify says the tool is rolling out over the coming weeks in select markets to Free and Premium users aged 16 and older, though we don’t know which markets will be first.
Just like emoji reactions on platforms like Facebook Messenger, it works similarly, giving you a choice of six; a standard red heart, a laughing face, a thumbs-up, headphones, fire, and an emotional face. When you send a reaction, it appears next to the track name, and you can view the reactions added by other collaborators in the playlist.
The addition of Track Reactions means that Collaborative Playlists will now look slightly different than before. The profile image of playlist collaborators now appears on the song thumbnail indicating which member added which song, and now the Track Reaction icon has taken the spot to the right of a song title next to the three-dot button.
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Track Reactions are automatically enabled in Collaborative Playlists that have 10 or less members, and only the people within the playlist can view them, meaning outside viewers won’t be able to see which songs have which reactions. You also don’t have to stick with them if you don’t want to — the playlist creator can disable Track Reactions in the playlist’s Name and Details settings.
We’re going through a time where most of Spotify’s new tools are reliant on the powers of AI, most recently its two new AI features for podcasts, so Track Reactions feels like a reminder that Spotify does have human elements to its user experience.
When it comes to Collaborative Playlists, I use them mainly for creating playlists with friends for gatherings and other social events (we have an annual summer meet-up, so the tool really comes in handy there). Now that Spotify has thrown Track Reactions into the mix, I can’t see it being used for anything other than judging each other’s song choices — and I’m actually okay with that.
Emoji reactions are a commonly-used feature among my friends across our slew of group chats, whether that’s for reacting to silly texts on Facebook Messenger or responding to unhinged videos we send to each other on Tik Tok. It won’t be any different in the case of Spotify, and hopefully it will encourage more conversations about the music we’re currently listening to.
For now, the emoji options are very limited and don’t quite represent a wide scope of emotions — they all seem to be pretty positive-leaning, with the exception of the emotional face emoji, which is often used to represent sadness or that feeling of ‘smiling through the pain’. To really take it to the next level, the choice to use custom emojis would open the floodgates for users to be even more expressive, or in my case, severely more judgemental.
Track Reactions are locked into the Collaborative Playlist experience for the time being, and Spotify hasn’t announced any plans to expand it to other playlist-making tools yet. We’ve contacted Spotify for more details about this, as well as which markets will have access first, so we’ll update this story when we know more.
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Rowan is an Editorial Associate and Apprentice Writer for Tech Radar. A recent addition to the news team, he is involved in generating stories for topics that spread across Tech Radar's categories. His interests in audio tech and knowledge in entertainment culture help bring the latest updates in tech news to our readers.
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