Collaborative Up Next
SoundShare brings a whole new experience to social music. It allows anyone to see what their friends are listening to, like, comment, tag their friends on songs and of course, build collaborative playlists. But SoundShare goes a lot further, it breaks walls down, it brings people closer because it is a cross platform social network. Which means that users on Apple Music can interact with their friends on Spotify, Deezer or just SoundShare. There is no fragmentation anymore.
Today, we are bringing a really cool new feature that takes social even further. Collaborative Up Next. Up Next is what’s coming up when playing a list of songs. When you go to a playlist, your friends’ feed or any list of songs and press play on one of them, your Up Next will consist of the upcoming songs. You can add songs to play next or to the end of the queue. But today we are also adding the ability to allow your friends to interact with it.
Imagine this, you are throwing a party, and your iPhone is connected to your home system. And for this party, you’ve created a playlist and let it play throughout the entire night. But you have a lot going on, after all, it’s your party, so you can’t constantly keep an eye on what's playing. Sometimes a party lasts longer than the playlist you’ve created. Or maybe, some of the songs you’ve picked are not the best ones. Currently, if a friend at the party wants to “fix this”, the best way is to go after your phone (sometimes it's in your pocket — so this person needs to find you there at the party first), ask for your password, unlock the phone and then re-arrange or add more songs to the playlist (since it’s your phone that is connected to the home system). And if these friends want to constantly add songs, can you imagine how bad this experience will be?
Wouldn’t it be cool if your friends could also interact with your now playing queue on the fly, from their own devices? They wouldn’t need to ask you for your phone and your password, they wouldn’t need to try to find you at the party all the time and they wouldn’t bother you at all.
And that’s what we've set out to do with SoundShare’s new update 2.7.3.
How it works:
1. Create a new Playlist.
Go to your "Me" tab and tap on Playlists. Then, create a new one and name what you want. In this example, we'll create a "House" Playlist.
2. Add all friends you want to grant permission to manage this playlist with you.
This is where you will grant permission to your friends to manage your playlist. Tap the + button and select which friends you want to add.
* Note: Any user inside this playlist can also have their Up Next updated. It doesn't need to always be the owner of the playlist.
3. After you've added a couple of songs, just start playing this playlist.
When you press play from a collaborative playlist, you enter into the Collaborative Up Next mode. So, every friend you've added on step 2, will also have control over what’s currently playing on your device, while you are playing this collaborative playlist.
* This step is really important. In order to your friends update your Up Next, you need to be playing the Collaborative Playlist on your device. Otherwise, they'll be just updating the playlist itself and not the Up Next.
4. Just add any song to this playlist to update Up Next.
It's really simple to have your queue updated from your friends. They just need to add a song to the playlist you’ve invited them, while you are playing this exact same playlist on your device. SoundShare understands that it is the now playing playlist on your device and updates the Up Next.
5. Oh, and this is also cross platform.
You can play all the songs in the party using Apple Music, while your friends update your queue from their Spotify or Deezer account.
SoundShare is free and can be downloaded from the App Store here.
