How to See Friend Activity on Spotify?

Spotify has a great position in the world of music streaming services mainly because of its vast collection, personalized recommendations, and free music for all people. Besides, one of the platform's unique features that enhances this sense of musical camaraderie is the ability to see your friends' activity in real time. Spotify offers a feature Friend Activity that allows you to see what your Spotify or Facebook friends are playing on the platform. So how to see Friend Activity on Spotify and check what your friends are listening to? Follow us to find the answers right now.

How to See Friend Activity on Spotify

Part 1. How to Enable or Disable Friend Activity?

Friend Activity has a lot of potential to be fun. You can see what your friends you followed are listening to on Spotify by enabling Friend Activity on the app.

Step 1 Open the Spotify app and log into your account.

Step 2 Move to the upper right corner and click on your profile icon to select "Settings".

Step 3 Scroll down to the Display field and find "See what your friends are playing".

Step 4 Toggle on the button to enable Friend Activity and toggle it off to disable this feature.

enable to see what your friends are playing

Part 2. How to See Friend Activity on Spotify?

Friend Activity is shown as a tab to allow you to see what songs your friends are listening to. But attention, this feature is available only on the desktop app. To see your friend's listening activity in real time, follow the steps.

Step 1 Launch the Spotify app on your computer. If you don’t have the app, download and install it from Spotify's official website.

Step 2 Log into your Spotify account and make sure the Friend Activity is enabled.

Step 3 Click on the "Friend Activity" icon next to your profile icon.

click to see friend activity

Step 4 You will then see the Friend Activity tab on the right, showing the song and artist your friends are listening to.

see friend activity

Part 3. How to Download My Friend's Spotify Playlists?

After entering to check your friend’s activity, you can see his/her now playing songs and playlists. Can you download your friend's song or playlist if you find it catches your ear? Of course, you can. Regarding downloading your friend's playlist or any playlist on Spotify, Kigo Music One demonstrates great use. Kigo Music One allows you to download and convert any song or playlist on Spotify to your local computers while keeping the original audio quality and important metadata. This program is equipped with a powerful batch download function, facilitating downloading an entire playlist or multiple playlists in a batch, saving time and effort.

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Step 1 Launch Kigo Music One and select Spotify from the primary interface. It offers two audio sources - app and web player. The former requires you to have the Spotify app on your computer, while the latter works via the built-in Spotify web player. Pick a source as you wish and log into your Spotify account.

select music streaming site as Spotify

Step 2 On the pop-up Spotify app or web player, go ahead to your friend's playlist or any playlist you are going to download. Open it and click on "+" in the bottom right. Select the entire playlist or some of the songs you like and click on "Add". The songs will be added to the download queue.

click to add songs
add spotify songs

Step 3 Go to "Settings" on Kigo Music One. You are offered some customized options like output format, output quality, and output path. Besides, you can rename the output files in batches with the provided options, and output the songs into folders via playlist by choosing "Playlist" in the Output Organized field.

settings

Step 4 Click "Convert" under the Home tab to begin downloading Spotify playlists. Kigo Music One will proceed with Spotify music at a fast speed while preserving ID3 tags. After converting, you can find the Spotify playlists in your local folder.

converting spotify songs

Part 4. How to Show or Hide My Activity on Spotify?

While some people want to enhance social connectivity by showing his/her Spotify activity, others value their privacy and don't want to share their listening activity with their followers on their Friend Activity tab. Can you turn on or off your activity as you wish? Luckily, Spotify entitles you to the right.

On Mobile:

Step 1 Open the Spotify app and log into your account.

Step 2 Tap on your profile icon in the upper left and select "Settings and privacy".

Step 3 Scroll down to the "Privacy & Social" section.

Step 4 Toggle on the button "Privacy session" to hide your Friend Activity. Meanwhile, you can turn off the feature "Listening activity" to prevent your followers from seeing your activity.

Step 5 To show your Friend Activity, simply toggle off the "Privacy session" button and turn on "Listening activity" below.

enable private session on mobile

On Desktop:

Step 1 Open the Spotify and log into your account.

Step 2 Click on your profile icon in the upper right and select "Privacy session" from the drop-down list. (Alternatively, you can click on the three dots in the upper left and select "File > Privacy session". Besides, you can click on your profile > Settings, and turn on "Start a private session" under the Social field.)

Step 3 Once it is activated, you will see a padlock icon in the upper.

enable private session on desktop

Note: Private Session can temporarily hide your listening from Friend Activity for 6 hours. It will end automatically after 6 hours, or when you restart Spotify. But you can turn off the "Share my listening activity on Spotify" to stop sharing.

Part 5. How to Fix Friend Activity Not Updating?

Friend Activity shows the real-time activity of your friends. What to do if it hasn’t been updated for a while? This part discusses 5 general solutions to address this issue.

Solution 1. Check for Updates:

Make sure you are using the latest version of the Spotify desktop app. Otherwise, restart the app and wait for the updates. Alternatively, you can download and install the latest version from the Spotify official website.

Solution 2. Restart the Spotify App:

The Spotify app may crash after running for some time and may cause the not updating issue. Simply quit Spotify and re-launch it in a while.

Solution 3. Log Out and Log In:

Click your profile icon and select "Log out" your Spotify account. If you have logged into your account on other devices, click "Profile > Account > Sign out everywhere" to make sure your account is totally logged out. Then enter your credentials to log in again on the Spotify desktop app.

Solution 4. Reinstall Spotify App:

When the above methods cannot solve this problem, try to completely uninstall the Spotify app from your computer and re-install the latest version from the Spotify official website.


Conclusion

The feature of Friend Activity on Spotify enhances our social experience on Spotify, allowing us to see what our friends are listening to on this platform, and provides another approach with us to find new music. By going through this article, you can learn how to enable or disable the Friend Activity feature, how to see your friend's activity on Spotify, show or hide your listening activity, as well as some practical solutions to resolve Friend Activity not updating issue. More importantly, if you find your friend's Spotify music catches your ear, you can use Kigo Music One to download your friend's songs and playlists for offline listening. Try this powerful Kigo Music One and enjoy music anytime anywhere.

Note: The trial version allows you to download only the first minutes of each file. To access the full length, please unlock it with a valid license code.

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Ava Hamilton | Senior Writer

She has been working in the audio and video industry for many years and is familiar with various mainstream audio and video streaming platforms. She has shared a lot of information about audio and video conversion tools, technologies and trends, and provided professional suggestions, detailed reviews and guides.

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