How To Use Spotify’s ‘Private Session’ Feature
Want to jam along to songs on Spotify without your friends knowing? There’s a feature that keeps your listening preferences rock-bottom.
One of the many well thought-out features Spotify What’s on offer is the ability to share musical preferences with friends, but just in case a user isn’t in the mood for others to track their listening activity, there’s a nifty option to keep sessions private within the app. With this setting, users can enjoy the genre of music they want to immerse themselves in without fear of judgement. Conveniently, it’s a feature that’s available on both the desktop and mobile apps.
By default, Spotify remembers every single song that a person accesses on the platform. Every time a track is played, it has the opportunity to influence the app’s music recommendation algorithm. By enabling Spotify’s private session feature, songs playing during the listening session will not be recorded as an activity. Tracks will not affect or be included in certain playlists created by Spotify that are curated specifically for the user.
There are two ways to start a private session on Spotify. To start listening to songs anonymously on a mobile device, launch the Spotify app and click “home‘ icon in the lower left corner of the screen. Go to ‘settings‘ (gear icon) and select ‘Social.‘ Turn on the switch next to ‘private session‘ To enable the feature on Spotify Desktop, launch the app and click the drop down arrow next to the username in the top right corner of the page and go to ‘private session.’ This should create a padlock icon next to the username to indicate a private session is in progress. To stop private listening, simply repeat the steps for your chosen method and tap or click “private session’ again to turn it off. In addition, a Spotify Private Session is also terminated by default when the app is closed and restarted, or after a period of inactivity on the platform.
When to use Spotify’s private session feature
There are a few instances where an option to listen to music incognito can come in handy. Users who have musical tastes that other people find questionable can freely enjoy their Guilty Pleasure tracks without bearing the brunt of the teasing they may receive from their friends and followers on Spotify. If a user wants to skew the numbers and not want their favorite musicians to be too obvious in the year-end Spotify Wrapped, they can often take advantage of private sessions to hear their favorite anthems repeated. Finally, users who let their partners or children play songs using their Spotify account can enable this feature to prevent binge listening to Disney songs from ruining their in-app listening history or affecting new music recommendations.
There are a few things to keep in mind when using Spotify’s private session feature. For example, if Spotify is currently playing on a computer, a Private Session cannot be started on any other mobile device. That ‘Social‘menu below SpotifyThe settings of will also be greyed out and not accessible. Therefore, make sure that other ongoing listening sessions are ended properly before enabling the feature.
Source: Spotify