In an effort to transition from a dedicated music streaming service to a social media platform, Spotify is set to add support for group messaging to improve its in-app messaging functionality.
The update comes a year after Spotify released one-to-one messaging. With the conference messaging feature, Spotify users can now connect more easily with their music-loving friends and colleagues.
It’s worth noting that these advancements don’t negate the difficulty of finding people on Spotify. This remains a tedious thing to do.
The biggest obstacle for users who want to find others on Spotify is that they cannot search for others by unique username, and searching by display name often yields unsatisfactory results because many users may share the same name.
For now, messaging on Spotify is limited to users you’ve already interacted with through Spotify’s social features, making it difficult to initiate conversations with new users without using invite links.
Evidence from version 9.1.20.1132 of Spotify’s Android app suggests that the company may soon address this limitation by allowing users to change their username.
The addition of group chat to Spotify is a huge upgrade, however, because it frames usernames as social handles, a term typically associated with social media platforms.
The platform has relied on usernames since its inception, but they are actually auto-generated alphanumeric strings since 2018, so they are not user-friendly.
Editable usernames could simplify user interactions on the platform, making it easier to log in without relying on previous links or interactions.
Although the release timeline for this laudable feature is uncertain, it marks an important milestone in Spotify’s continued transformation into a social media hub.
