Feature request written by Mike Frash //
The socialization of music has been both a boon and detriment to artists. Awareness and engagement has never been easier — but monetizing can now be more of a struggle.
Streaming service titan Spotify gets most of the negative press surrounding unfair artist compensation (see Thom Yorke, Taylor Swift and Bjork as recent examples), but they’ve done better than their competitors in connecting listeners to their friends — corralling an evolution of human interaction that thrived on real life word of mouth for centuries until Napster, peer-to-peer sharing came along.
The right sidebar of the Spotify application shows what your friends are currently listing to, which is one of Spotify’s best features. It brings to you the music that is trending with your Facebook friends.
So, isn’t the next natural step to patch into your friends’ song selection process, essentially choosing to make your friend a digital DJ? If I notice my friend play three songs in a row that match my mood, wouldn’t it be valuable if there was a simple “DJ” button to click next to each user’s name? Then you’d be listening to your friend DJ live. More importantly, you would be listening to music together in real time. This would also inject a higher level of thoughtfulness into user curation.
I would use this feature often — what better way would there be to have music curated for you than by the people you wish you were hanging out with instead of being in that 40-hour-a-week cubicle?
Spotify users — would you dig this feature?
Send your feature request ideas to ShowbamsSubmit@gmail.com.
I like this idea