Discover the Untold Stories Behind Your Favorite Music on Spotify

Spotify is enhancing the music experience by introducing new features that spotlight the creators behind the tracks you love. These updates aim to connect listeners with producers, engineers, songwriters, background vocalists, and more. Spotify also plans to reveal how songs connect and what inspires them, according to their recent announcement.

SongDNA: Uncover the Connections

Spotify’s new interactive feature, SongDNA, allows you to explore the intricate web of music creation. You can see which songs sampled a particular track, discover who has covered a tune, and explore other projects involving the song’s collaborators.

As reported earlier, Spotify has been working on SongDNA to help users discover music through song credits. Reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong spotted references to the feature in the app’s code. With SongDNA, Spotify users can explore the various projects that artists, musicians, and others have engaged in.

The Song Credits feature previously highlighted only the topline performance, songwriting, and production credits.

References to sampled music come from WhoSampled, the online community database that Spotify acquired. TIDAL also offers interactive credits, allowing users to explore music through the contributors behind the songs.

“About the Song”: The Inspiration Behind the Music

The “About the song” feature is also planned. It will allow listeners to swipe through cards in the “Now Playing” view, revealing details like what inspired the song, the stories behind the music, and the cultural impact. Spotify will source these stories from third-party resources, and the cards will include links to these sites.

Spotify previously partnered with lyrics site Genius to offer backstories on certain tracks, but this feature relied on the stories in Genius’s database. The upcoming feature will link out to various sources on the web, including informational sites like Wikipedia and news sites. Spotify and Genius first partnered to bring this type of background information to music lovers.

Spotify says the expanded Song Credits will roll out starting Wednesday on mobile devices and will come to desktop in the months ahead.

SongDNA and About the Song will only be available to Premium subscribers. However, these features won’t launch until early next year, initially as Spotify for Artists Preview. This allows those involved with the music a chance to preview the features first and ensure the credits are accurate before they’re made available to the wider public.