You may have noticed whenever you hop into a Lyft, more times than not, the driver asks what you want to listen to. You, like us, might tend to say you don’t have a preference, even though you most definitely do because you don’t feel like racking your brain or going through your SoundCloud to communicate to the driver some obscure track you’ve been listening to. If only there was another way…
Well, Lyft might be looking at creating a feature to let drivers and passengers seamlessly collaborate in selecting music to play during the ride, according to a recent patent granted to Lyft. The patent, originally filed in 2014, describes several ways Lyft could implement a driver jukebox. A source familiar with the matter says the patent was filed from work completed at an internal hackathon but nothing is currently in the works.
But Lyft and Uber have a habit of copying features from each other and just last month Uber partnered with Pandora to let drivers select stations from within its driver-side app. Uber also has a partnership in place with Spotify that lets riders pick songs to listen to during the ride.
Lyft has yet to do anything in the music partnership arena, so we would love to see something like the driver jukebox make its way into the app.
Some variations of the system would let a rider select music upon getting into the car, while other ones would enable both the driver and the rider to select songs. The patent also outlines varying functionality across services like Rdio and Spotify, as well as the option to play tracks from those services based on mutual likes of the rider and passenger.
“We hold patents on a variety of ideas — some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don’t,” a Lyft spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patents.”
You can see what the driver jukebox might look like if Lyft does decide to move forward with it.
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