Spotify will bring more social sharing options to its Android and iOS apps starting today, including a way to link to timestamps in podcasts. When you click the share button, you will see a toggle option that allows you to create a link to the current playing time. After sharing the link, anyone who clicks on it can start listening to the podcast from the same location.
The idea seems to be to spark conversations. If the host(s) says something particularly interesting you want to speak with your friends about, it’ll be easier to direct them to a certain part of an episode, just like you might share a timestamp of a YouTube video.
Podcasts have been a key growth area for Spotify over the past couple of years. A quarter of Spotify users (around 89 million) now listen to podcasts on the platform. Sharing on social media plays a major role in helping people find new things on Spotify, with around 40% of music discovery attributed to it, according to a survey of users. Perhaps timestamp sharing will do something similar for podcasts. It might encourage more users to sign up for podcast subscriptions too.
At the same time, Spotify users will be able to share songs through the Canvas function (turning the song page into a video art experience) in addition to Instagram stories, as well as Snapchat. You can also preview how the Canvas video will appear on your feed. The Canvas sharing table will only show the applications on your device. If you frequently post to Instagram Stories and don’t have Snapchat installed, you will see Instagram in the sharing options, but not Snapchat.
