Spotify has begun rolling out new features for its Premium Family plans meant to help everyone better manage the preferences and tastes of members who like to listen to such disparate musical choices from Billie Eilish to classic rock and music from The Lion King.
The changes include a new personalized Family Mix playlist that encompasses songs the whole family would potentially enjoy, as well as a new “Family Hub” where the family settings can now be managed in one simple place.
The changes, which Spotify announced on Monday, haven’t rolled out in a widespread way yet. They’re appearing first in Ireland, where the new features are rolling out now, ahead of wider availability “in all markets” this fall.
“With our updated plan,” the company announced in an official blog post, “Spotify Premium Family subscribers have on-demand access to 450,000 podcast titles and 50 million tracks of ad-free music. What’s more, parents will now be able to control the Explicit Content Filter setting of all other accounts on their plan (these parental controls are a long-requested feature).”
These kinds of bells and whistles and an increasing sense of feature-rich usefulness will continue to grow in importance as Spotify — which is still a long way from turning a profit — works to maintain its lead over Apple Music, its nearest competitor. Spotify has almost double the number of paying customers, with 108 million compared to Apple’s 60 million.
In terms of the Family Plan additions, Spotify says the new personalized playlist will be “updated regularly,” and you can also control who’s in each listening session to ensure you and your family enjoy the best shared listening moments together. Additionally, the new Family Hub means the users who are billed now have a convenient place where they can add or remove family members, in addition to adjusting parental controls and keeping the home address up to date.
When it comes to Spotify, experimentation certainly seems to be the order of the day at the moment. As we noted only a few days ago, the streaming music giant is also planning to test a price increase in Scandinavia — presumably ahead of a wider rollout, depending on how that increase is received.
