The Best App to Always Win at Music Trivia
Spotify and Apple Music can be great music discovery tools, but they don’t do a great job of telling you who you’re listening to. You may know every lyric to “Don’t Stop Believin'”, but if you don’t know what year it came out, you’ll let your quiz team down. (By the way, this is 1981.)
NowPlaying is an app that wants to be an encyclopedia of musical trivia. It gives you more information about the song, album, artist, or band you’re listening to, and reveals some pretty important details along the way, including where the song or album was recorded and the names of all the musicians who listened to it. worked on any track.
The app listens to songs that are playing around you or links to your Apple Music account to pick up songs from your play history, making it pretty handy for finding the little things. It also packages this information into a nice interface.
To give you an example of what you can expect, we searched for the Green Day song “Holiday” using NowPlaying. Its liner notes include the story of how Green Day ran out of ideas and had the master files of the upcoming album stolen before the band began work on the American Idiot album. The following is about the album itself and there is a paragraph for each of his biggest hits.
You can also use the app to see the lyrics of any song provided by Genius. This won’t be a new feature for Apple Music users, but at least you won’t have to leave the app to follow a singer.
NowPlaying works well with popular artists and albums, but it’s not enough when you’re looking for little-known ones. The app has a lot of details to keep you hooked, but its database needs to expand for it to be the gold mine of minutiae it wants to be. You can download NowPlaying for free. If you want to access additional content and remove ads, there is a $10 per year subscription fee.