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How to Find Friends on Spotify Without a Friends List

Posted on · Updated by Nadia Rowan in Spotify

verified_against vendor-docs (the maker's own help pages, and nothing else) · verified_on · what these mean

Spotify will not read your phone contacts, and it has no friends list, so every way to find friends on Spotify starts from something the other person gives you or something you already know about their account.

Pick the branch that matches what you have. The routes differ sharply in reliability, and the one most guides lead with is the weakest of them.

This is the branch that works every time, and it is the one I would push people towards.

Ask them to open Home, tap their picture, choose View Profile, then use the share control to copy a link to that profile. When they send it, opening the link drops you straight onto their profile with a Follow button waiting.

The same screen produces a scannable code. Holding one phone up to another and scanning it inside the Spotify search camera does the same job in person, without either of you typing anything.

The reason to prefer this over everything below is that it removes ambiguity. There is exactly one account behind a link, and no chance of following a stranger with the same name.

If you only have a name, search and then filter

Open Search, type the display name, run the search, and switch to the Profiles filter in the results.

The filter is the important part. Without it, a person’s name competes against every track and playlist containing those words, and profiles sink below the music. With it, you get a list of accounts and nothing else.

The weakness is that display names are not unique. Search a common name and Spotify returns a wall of near-identical entries with no email, no location and often no picture to separate them, and it will not tell you which one has followers in common with you. For a common name this method is close to useless, and asking for the profile link is worth the extra message.

An account’s username, the generated string of letters and digits, will also resolve if you have it. Almost nobody knows their own, so this is a fallback for support tickets rather than a way to find people.

If your accounts are both connected to Facebook

Spotify still offers a Facebook-backed discovery screen. From Settings, open View profile, then the three-dot menu, then Find friends. It lists Facebook friends whose Spotify accounts are connected, with a follow control beside each.

Two conditions have to hold at once: both accounts connected, and both connections still working. Spotify’s forums carry a long tail of reports where the list comes back empty or partial, which is what happens to a feature depending on a linkage most new accounts never make. Treat it as a bonus rather than a plan.

The older method built on the Spotify page inside Facebook, where you clicked through to a list of friends and copied names across by hand, no longer produces that list. Any instruction involving an app ID typed into a Facebook address bar is describing something that stopped working.

What following someone gets you

Following puts their public playlists in reach and puts them in Friend Activity, the panel showing what people are playing in near real time.

Friend Activity is a desktop feature and has to be switched on. In Settings, under the display section, turn on the option to see what your friends are playing, and the panel appears down the side of the window. A window narrowed too far hides it again, which accounts for a fair share of the “my friend activity disappeared” reports.

Three conditions must all hold before anyone appears in it, and this is where the feature usually fails rather than in your settings:

  • You follow them.
  • They have listening activity switched on in their own privacy settings.
  • They have played more than half a minute of something in the last week, outside a private session.

Any one of those failing produces an empty panel with no explanation. If a friend is missing, the second condition is the likeliest cause and it is theirs to change, not yours.

Listening together instead of watching

If the point is shared listening rather than observation, a Jam does more than a follow. Starting one needs Premium and joining one does not, so a paying host can pull in free accounts. Everyone lands in the same queue and can add to it, in person over a scanned code or remotely over a link.

The limit is that a Jam is a session rather than a relationship. Close it and nothing persists except whatever you saved out of the queue, so it is a tool for an evening rather than a way to stay connected.

Keeping yourself out of all this

The same mechanisms run in reverse. Turning off listening activity removes you from other people’s Friend Activity, a private session hides a stretch of listening without changing the setting permanently, and playlists kept off your profile do not advertise your taste to anyone who lands on it.

Your profile stays findable by name regardless. There is no setting that makes an account unsearchable, which is worth knowing before you assume any of the above hides you completely.

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