Early next year, iOS 17.3 is expected to bring the Apple Music Collaborative Playlists feature to iPhone users. As the name suggests, you can invite someone to collaborate on a playlist in the music streaming service. While it was first expected that this function would be available with iOS 17.2, Apple needed more time to improve it and add a few other perks, such as the possibility to react to a song added by a friend.
Apple Music Collaborative Playlists will be available for iPhone and iPad users, while Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV owners will be able to stream those lists. Here’s how to take full advantage of the new feature.
How to create a collaborative playlist on Apple Music
On your iPhone running iOS 17.3, follow these steps:
- Open Apple Music and select a playlist or create a new one;
- In the top right corner, there’s an icon to add someone to the playlist
- You can choose to Start Collaboration or approve collaborators
- If you choose to start collaboration, you can share a link or QR Code with a friend or family member
This link/QR Code works for seven days. Apple Music says that you can generate a new link if you want to prevent others from joining your list with the current link. Once this person – or these people – joins your playlist, you’ll see the songs they added and their names at the end of the list.
If you don’t want people to collaborate on your playlist, you can tap the two people icon on the top right corner and then choose “Stop the Collaboration.” That done, you can remove the songs someone else added and make the playlist your own again.
In addition, you can react using an emoji to a song added to a playlist. With that, your friends will be able to add a smiley face to a happy song, a heart to a love song, or even a sad face to a sad song.
That said, iOS 17.3 is still in beta, and it will likely be available to all users early next year.