Snap Map has long been the site of choice for finding out where your friends are in the real world. Now, the platform is extending its functionality to show what they are listening to in real time. Now Playing, as it was officially launched on July 27, will be Snapchat's new feature to show you what they are listening to. This new feature transforms the location-based map into a live feed of the activity of your friends with Spotify. Now Playing is available worldwide on Snapchat and Spotify and has been rolled out to any region where Snapchat and Spotify are enabled.
A seamless integration and user experience. Our new social music experience is designed to be intuitive. When we connect a user to Snapchat from Spotify via the Snap Map interface, Sounds menu, friend profile, or app settings, their current music track will show up right next to their Bitmoji on the map. This integration goes beyond a simple badge. Anyone who has the access to view the location of a friend can simply tap on the floating track card to jump straight to Spotify. Importantly, users can save the song they discover to their Liked Songs library and browse through Snapchat Spotlight videos made by using the same audio track if they want. This convenient saving feature is not only applicable to the map itself but songs that are found organically through Spotlight feeds or Snapchat’s own Sound Pages can be saved to the Spotify music library instantly as well.
The Philosophy behind the Feature. The core idea behind this collaboration is to build digital connections between people rather than being an algorithmic music discovery tool. Manny Adler, Snap’s Head of Music, said music is social and that it’s one of the most personal ways people express themselves, and by doing so, it is even more meaningful when it connects friends in the digital space. Now Playing, Adler said, is a new kind of digital expression and organic discovery that brings the Snap Map experience into existence, so Snapchatters can share the customized soundtrack of their day-to-day lives while the people they know and associate with for the first time will find music with them.
Robust privacy controls and visibility options. Snap knows that continuous tracking can be a problem and has implemented privacy controls in the foundation of the product. It has at least four visibility choices: Friends, Friends on the Map, Select Friends, or No One. Most importantly, Now Playing is designed only to display a live, currently playing track. It does not track your past listening history (or the last played song), and no one can follow your past listening history. Moreover, this broadcasting is not turned on by default. The music sharing is still active if you have opened the Snapchat app within the last twenty-four hours. If you just go quiet and stay off the app for longer than that, the broadcasting automatically freezes for your next login. If you want privacy and privacy is important to you, you can actually just stop the music sharing for three hours, twenty-four hours, or indefinitely at any point.
Global rollout and future. We are also working on Now Playing to work across all compatible international markets, with Canada getting added just a little bit later on. Spotify is currently the only service available at launch, but Snap is very clear that this deep integration will be extended to other popular streaming options in the future. This big update is consistent with Snapchat’s Sounds feature that has allowed users to add short, fully licensed music clips to their Snaps and Stories since 2020. But Now Playing takes that concept more than a step further by transforming music from individual curated posts to a continuous, ambient listening experience that users can do at their own leisure on the map. Since Snap publicly reports its map reaches a staggering audience of over 450 million active users every month, this Spotify integration instantly commands a much larger built-in user base than any standalone music feature could traditionally hope to achieve at launch.
