[Mobile] Please bring back the old group session. "Play from same device"

[tgerhardt1]

The old group session, "play from same device option" has been removed and it has saddened many people. It seems the only group session option is now remote group sessions, where the music is played on each individual device.

This group session, "play from same device" feature was personally one of my favorite features of Spotify. When it was first introduced, I quite literally showed all of my friends to use it. I understand it was in beta, but this feature was used by many people, quite literally all the time. We know this feature did not work perfectly, but we would use it regardless of the tiny flaws, it was honestly my favorite thing about Spotify.

Whenever I, or any group, would have friends over, I would always offer to start a group session so that everyone could contribute to the music being played. Having this option, friends could seamlessly contribute to the music being played so that one person would not selfishly play music the entire time. It was so fun having everyone able to contribute, without having to hand over the one single phone to everyone that was connected to the device, just to add a few songs to the queue. Having someone scan a code and then instantly able to add songs to the queue was a perfect idea for hanging out with friends, in person.

It appears with the new update, there is only an option for remote group sessions where the music is played on each individual device, I'm asking to consider bringing back the "play from same device."

To recap, this feature allowed people to share music during in-person hang sessions, and from the people I had introduced to it, all found it to be one of the most fun features of Spotify.

So, dear Spotify, please bring back this feature!

Thanks,

Troy and many others!!

[akassraie]

This feature was fantastic. Please bring it back. 

[johnoth]

Taking this feature away was a big mistake. This was a good feature for house parties or gatherings. In fact it took away the problem of everybody wanting to connect to the aux and play their own music. It actually made life easier.

[MattSuda]

Hey @tgerhardt1  @johnoth  @akassraie 

The way Group Session works has changed. There is now a new Group Session feature for sharing the control in person. You should see this when you connect to another device using Spotify Connect such as a speaker.

This new feature allows everyone on the same WiFi network (if not you can still invite them) to control a Spotify Connect device such as a speaker. All of the same features such as shared queue should still be there. To make the naming clearer, regular Group Session has been renamed to Remote Group Session.

You can check out the Group Session support article for more info:

https://support.spotify.com/article/group-session/

[akassraie]

@mattsuda This doesn’t seem to work with Amazon speakers. 

[Tekmen]

• @MattSuda 

Does this mean if you dont have a spotify connect device(just a normal speaker via aux for example) or dont have a speaker at all, you cant have a shared queue?  Really bad change, I hope you revisit this feature and bring back the old system.

[Jules0]

100 % true, thank you! 

[patrick_joseph]

This feature was very useful when I was in a group in a car where everyone would connect to my session which was bluetoothed to my phone. Anyone could add songs to the queue. This is now not possible. 

[MafeG]

Updated on 2022-02-16

Hello and thanks for submitting your idea to the Idea Exchange!

We've gone ahead and marked this as a new suggestion. Spotify Staff will look into this idea once it reaches the necessary amount of votes.

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Cheers!

[EmreAKn]

This update makes no sense. The main reason most of us used this feature was to be able to control music in the SAME room, SAME car and etc. Now each device plays the song at the same time. Yall need to give more time on bringing Hi-Fi sound and stop removing useful features. Like why did that feature even bother you? Let us enjoy it.

[Luan]

Updated on 2022-02-18

Hey! Looks like your idea is growing up fast and it's amazing! We are going to change its status to 'Good Suggestion' now and we hope it continues being supported by more and more users.
Thanks again for your suggestion. We really appreciate it 🙂

More information about how the Spotify Idea Exchange works can be found here.