If you’ve logged onto Apple Music recently, you may have spotted a new playlist, titled Friends Mix.
If you haven’t noticed it, don’t worry, not everyone has access to the new feature yet. This is apparently a beta version and the full release is expected to roll out in September, according to Billboard.
The new Friends Mix feature will allow users to connect and know more about their friends’ music tastes. Basically, Apple Music will create a playlist of 25 songs using music listened to by a users’ friends. While the songs will be chosen from friends’ listening history, the playlists are designed with the target user’s musical tastes in mind.
In other words: Apple will gather up your friends‘ favorite songs, but choose what they show you based on your tastes.
This is the fourth custom playlist Apple Music has created. When IOS 10 dropped in 2016, Apple Music introduced My New Music Mix and My Favorites Mix, which are custom playlists with different songs for every user. Shortly after that, My Chill Mix came out, which was a custom playlist comprised of music the specific user would find… “chill.”
Like these custom playlists, the new Friends Mix will be updated weekly.
The Friends Mix brings Apple Music one step closer into the realm of social media platform rather than being just another music streaming service.
But not everybody is quite on board just yet — because our friends don’t always have the best taste in music. As one Redditor (u/Hangloosebra) put it, “That’s pretty cool. [Too] bad my friends listen to upchurch all day long which is horrible.”
And what about our own personal music taste? There’s something unsettling knowing that all my guilty pleasure music could be put on blast. The fact that Apple Music is currently going through every user’s listening history and sending it to their friends kind of creeps me out. At least, the mix is only shared with friends, so choose your friends wisely.
Friends Mix appears to be the latest response by Apple Music to Spotify’s custom playlists. Those have been in existence for a while now on a much bigger scale than Apple Music. And this social Friends Mix can also help bring more users to Apple Music by offering more than just music. Going toe-to-toe with Spotify is what it’s all about for Apple Music right now, with some reports saying that the world’s first trillion dollar company has finally surpassed Spotify’s user base in the United States. Not that everyone seems to know that.