Spotify is getting a much-needed feature this week. The company just announced Group Session, a new social feature within the audio streaming service’s app.

The new feature, as you may have already guessed, lets users listen to music with each other, in real-time. The addition of the feature comes at a perfect time: most people are stuck at home, and so if you are just hanging out with friends online, you can listen to the same music at the same time.

Group Session is launching in a beta today and allows groups of two or more to listen to music in real-time. The experience gives users control over the playback, so anyone can play/pause music, skip forward, change songs, add tracks to the queue, etc.

The new feature is only limited to Spotify’s Premium users, however.

Here’s how the feature works:

To access the feature, the “host” can tap the Connect menu in the bottom left corner of their play screen and share the scannable code with “guests”. Guests can join the session by scanning the host’s scannable code. Then, using the standard controls, both host and guests are empowered to pause, play, skip and select tracks on the queue as well as add in choices of their own. Changes are immediately reflected on all participant devices.

This is a great new addition to Spotify, to be honest. Spotify previously let multiple users control music on a single Spotify Connect device, but that’s obviously not really useful considering the current world situations. With Group Session, you don’t have to be near each other and can listen along whenever you want, as long as you have Spotify Premium.

Tagged with Spotify, Spotify Premium