Sneak peeks at Apple Music’s upcoming social features

Photo by Apple Insider

At WWDC last month, Apple did announce plans to add a new social layer to its streaming music platform. The company’s previous efforts to add connection features in the app have been shaky at best. But Apple Insider has posted some screenshots from the beta of iOS 11 showing the social tools in action, and so far it seems like a more manageable and less obtrusive implementation.

In the beta version, Apple Music users can set some privacy controls over their listening. They can opt for totally open sharing or to manually choose who their choices are shared with. Also, not all of your playlists are automatically shared, so any secret mixtapes or guilty pleasures can be kept that way.

Many streaming services have made efforts to make social sharing a factor in their platforms, but few of those projects have been complete home runs. We’ll be watching closely to see what the reactions are to this new change when iOS 11 goes live.

Anna Washenko