What you need to know
- Spotify is launching a new music personalization and recommendation feature.
- Friends Mix lets users create playlists based on their friend's music choices.
- It is based on the app's Blend playlist feature introduced last year, which lets users mix their music tastes into a single playlist.
Spotify is introducing a new personalized playlist for its users called "Friends Mix." The new feature helps users discover new and familiar tracks based on what their friends are listening to. It may sound similar to Spotify's existing Blend, but it's slightly different.
With Blend, two users merge their favorite music tracks and combine them into a shared playlist. Technically, the new Friends Mix is still based on Blend, but instead, this playlist consists of just music that your friends are listening to, the company suggested in an accompanying blog post.
Discovering new music through your best friends' tunes requires you to create at least three Blends with friends. You can do this by searching "Blend" in the Spotify app and clicking "invite" to add a new friend. Once the invitation is accepted, the music application will generate a Blend playlist, mixing your music tastes with your friends. After three of these are created, the new Friends Mix feature will appear in the Made for You hub on Spotify.
Further, the new Friends Mix is said to be updated daily and is available on Spotify on both iOS and desktop, with no word on Android availability. Fortunately, the feature isn't paywalled, meaning free Spotify users can create Friends Mixes, too.
The new Friends Mix on the platform is a welcome addition that appears to be a modern take on making mixtapes for friends. Personalization features such as this are no doubt why Spotify remains one of the best music streaming apps available. Hopefully, this new Friends Mix feature will arrive on Android devices sooner rather than later.
