What would that be?

I think it would be quite cool (and viral) if Spotify allowed any number of users to listen to the same playlist in sync. Some user would start playing it and anybody who joins in would listen to the same thing at the same time as the one that started it first. This way multiple users could listen to the same music while interacting in other ways (i.e. chatting) as if they were in the same room.

Who would use that?

Well people do chat a lot. Many do group chats too. Especially younger people. They all have various IM clients to do it or go to online chat rooms etc. It would be very nice for people to be able to share music while sharing an activity like chat. They can share Spotify Playlists now but they cannot listen to the same thing at the same time without having all of them to synchronise manually for each song or playlist.

There are other uses I could think of but I think this generic case is good enough. For instance I would love to have that ability in the chat room of my blues music related social network where we meet and talk about music.

How would that work?

Well Spotify should be able to figure that out, but I guess a fairly straight forward way would be to have a special decorator on a regular Spotify URL that will instruct Spotify client to start playing the playlist not from its beginning, but from a specific point in a specific song designated by the server. The server syncs everybody’s client. This way, anybody that opens the playlist will hear the same thing as anybody else who is currently playing it.

Why would a thing like that succeed?

Well since Spotify works only through a client, it can be transparently available to all its users regardless of the thing they are doing. A feature like that will essentially integrate the use of Spotify with any collaborative activity, any of their users have, in any of the other independent systems they use. For instance chat on Windows Live Messenger while listening to music like they were on the same room. Users tend to get the easy solution to issues. And this is a really easy solution that catches most if not all similar uses.

What good would this do for Spotify?

Well if you read the paragraph above, it’s maybe obvious that Spotify will have a good shot of becoming  de facto standard in music sharing across any collaborative app. This will be a clear competitive advantage and will probably increase revenue by increasing listening hours and thus exposure to advertising for non premium members. Moreover if they get such a placement they could start working with some of the IM market players towards a technical integration too which could allow them to serve better targeted ads to their audience (though this can get too tricky). I’m sure they can think of even more benefits than these.

So, there you have it. If you like the idea then tweet about it or share anyway you please. It might reach the ears of Spotify and they might even like it too.