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While the mixtape is long gone, you still might be looking for a new way to share your latest weekend mix with your coworkers, or stay connected to friends across the country by jamming out to your favorite songs together. Now you can use JQBX to share playlists, vote on songs, and lend your musical taste to everyone with a Spotify account.




How to Be a DJ


JQBX is ad-free, but requires that you (and every other user) have a Spotify Premium account. It’s available on iOS, Android, macOS, and as a web app at jqbx.fm. The app offers you a list of user-created public and private rooms, each one hosting one or more DJs spinning some tracks. You can search, save, and create public or password-protected rooms. To become a DJ simply join a room, hit “Be a DJ,” and put tracks in your DJ queue. Don’t worry about overflow; you can set a limit on the number of DJs.

Each DJ room has a chatroom where users can interact, and a quick thumbs up/thumbs down (“dope/lame”) rating system for each song. You can save songs played by other DJs to a new Spotify playlist for later listening and see a room’s track history (which you can export). Users can volunteer to become DJs, and if there’s more than one DJ, JQBX will rotate between users, playing one song at a time from their playlist.

Use Spotify to Manage Everything

Right now, JQBX’s method for adding songs to your queue is a bit limited (it can’t, for example, show your recently played tracks from Spotify). In the queue, you can add, rearrange, and delete any of your songs. You can also manage your queued and starred songs in Spotify, where JQBX will automatically create a Starred and Queued playlist that you can edit at your leisure. Your changes in Spotify are automatically reflected in the JQBX app (click “sync” if you don’t see your changes).


Over the past week, the Lifehacker staff has been sharing tunes in our own JQBX room, and we’re really enjoying it. If you want to join us, we’ll be spinning completely and totally work-appropriate tunes we know and love, and we invite you to listen along and contribute your own tunes. In JQBX, search for “Lifehacker Rocks” to find us jamming out all week long.