Be able to add friends and see them in your friend activity without facebook connected

[tommyneu]

I do not want or have a facebook account and neither does my friends but it seems pretty silly to have to connect to facebook in order to be able to see my friends activity on Spotify. Why can't it be something like if user A follows user B and user B follows user A they are then "friends" and can see each others activities in friend activity. 

The solutions online where they say to search "spotify:user:{username}" does not work on mobile or desktop.

[Yordan · Accepted solution]

Hi @tommyneu,

Sorry for the late reply, I just stumbled upon your post.

You don't necessarily need to connect your Spotify account to Facebook in order for the Friend Activity to work: you can simply follow the Spotify profiles of your friends instead! They can share the links to their profiles so you can give them a follow and next time they're listening to something on Spotify, their activity will show up in there.

Linking Facebook to your Spotify account simply spares you the need of locating each of your friends' accounts, that's it!

More info on the matter can be found here.

Hope this clears things up. Cheers!

[izzergh]

Hello!

I have seen this "solution" a few times on the 'net. While it's true you can view profiles and save them, there are some quality of life features exclusive to the "friend" relationship on Spotify. For example, I wanted to make a blend with several people I know in person. I could not invite them in-app, I had to share the link to their various preferred methods of communication.

If the "following/follower" relationship were expanded to have those social features that are currently exclusive to the mutual "friends" relationship, that would be an acceptable solution.

It seems odd, since Facebook is not required for anything else, and friends in Facebook vs Spotify are not one-to-one, that one would be a requirement for the other. Is there anything on the roadmap for remedying this disconnect?

[AlejaR]

Hey @izzergh,

Thanks for your reply in this thread.

We really appreciate the time you took to let us know your comments on the matter. We know you’d like to take this as an opportunity for Spotify to become an incredible app.

We'd like you to know other users had similar requests, so they posted some ideas about it in our Idea Boards. We located these:

• you should be able to directly message songs to your friends on the spotify app
• Introducing the chat section in Spotify app to share and listen music with friends in real time

We think these are great ideas too! That's why we'd suggest adding your vote and subscribing to them in the three-dot menu. That way you can stay up-to-date with any relevant news about them.

We appreciate your feedback. We'll be here if anything else comes up.
 

Cheers!

[fixSp0tifyPlz]

I still encounter similar issues. All I want is to add my friend as a FRIEND on Spotify, and see them in my "Friend Activity" pane on the right (on the Windows Desktop app). But I have tried everything and cannot accomplish it. 

I can get to their profile, I am following their profile, but there is no option anywhere to actually ADD them as a friend. I want to be able to see what they are listening to and them to see what I am listening to. I am a Facebook user, they are not. When I click the Add Friends button, it brings me to Facebook search in that side panel, but it says I have 0 friends on Spotify and I cannot search for anyone. I don't want to add this friend through Facebook. And I will note I have existing friends in my Friend Activity list, but I just care less about these as I want to add this one person. 

I don't understand why I can have these friend accounts in my Friend Activity list, but have no way to remove these friends, not any way to add new ones to this list. 

I follow this friend, but cannot add them as a friend, it is infuriating. I understand Follow can be different than a "Friend", but in my experience, there is no way at all to ADD more friends. What is going on? Why can't I just be allowed to both Follow a profile and Add them as a Friend? 

[Mzzz]

Right now, and I have checked this in a long session with Spotify Support, I cannot search for Spotify Users who are not in my facebook net. I think it is against all sense. Some people I know are not on facebook (surprise); why am I limited to follow only those who are on facebook? I think Spotify will improve much if it will sever the weired connection to facebook. It used to be that way and it was great. Let's make Spotify awesome again. 

[Mzzz]

Excuse me, but this is outright infuriating. You suggest that we bypass (in complex fashions) the FEATURE that Spotify put there to make our life so much more difficult than it has to be. Why not remove the un-holly marriage to Facebook friends? why should we be restricted in that way? We just want to be able to search and find friends notwithstanding if they have or have not accounts on facebook. 

[Mzzz]

Again, why make it so complicated? Why should I ask friends to send me links? In the beginning of Spotify, I could search and find (from a search box) anyone on Spotify. From then on, we could be Spotify Friends and do all the 'friends things' we wished to easily. Somehow, and I have support sessions about this with Spotify, you ignore the straight forwards solution - bring it back to how it was before the funny marriage with Facebook. I would so much appriciate if anyone can relate to this in a direct manner and not send me and others to do all kinds of things to bypass the complicated mechanism which isn't doing anyone any good.