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Share Spotify tracks with your friends via the new iMessage app

The Spotify app icon on a smartphone.
Twindesign/123RF
You don’t need to be in the same room to enjoy the same tunes as your friends. Thanks to Spotify’s new iMessage app, you can easily text your favorite beats to your favorite people with just a few taps of the finger. Similar to the Spotify Messenger app, this new iMessage feature allows music lovers to search Spotify’s extensive music catalog for any track, and will begin suggesting song titles as you type. Once you’ve found your desired piece or song, tap a button to add a preview to your iMessage session with your friend — the preview is comprised of an album image, song title, and artist information.

There’s no “play” button associated with your Spotify iMessage, however. Recipients will instead see a Spotify logo in the top left corner — the only clue that the image you have sent is, in fact, a piece of music.

We should point out that recipients can only play a 30-second preview of the song within iMessage — to hear the whole thing, they’ll have to go to the Spotify app. And in order to play the preview at all, they’ll have to enable the new Spotify iMessage app (which is to say, have Spotify installed on their phone).

While Spotify hasn’t made a big announcement about the new feature yet, the iMessage extension was included in the music platform’s newest iOS app update this week. “Spotify’s iMessage app is available now, allowing users to quickly search for and share music with friends directly from iMessage,” a Spotify spokesperson told Engadget. “It’s the latest way in which we’re empowering users to share music with friends in a fast and fun way.”

The straightforward nature of this iMessage app ought to make it quite popular. After all, you don’t need a ton of functionality to just share a song with your friend. So the next time you think that the best response to a message comes in the form of a clever tune, just open up your new Spotify iMessage app, and get to sharing.

We’ve come a long way since the days of sharing mix tapes!

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