Spotify Will Now Use Artificial Intelligence to Tell You the Meaning of Your Favorite Songs.
Streaming services make it easy to listen to a lot of music, but they don’t always provide much information about the songs themselves. You can see the length of each track, the artist, and maybe even the songwriters, but you don’t know why the artist wrote the song or what it’s supposed to mean. Sure, you can search online for articles and blogs to learn more about your favorite music—or you can skim through Spotify’s new track summaries, which contain interesting facts about each track.
On Friday, Spotify announced a new feature called “About Song.” The feature, which is launching in beta, is accessible from the “Now Playing” section of the app. When selected, you’ll see information cards that you can swipe to get more detailed information about the song you’re listening to. Spotify states that this information is compiled from “third-party sources,” and in my testing, I found sources like Hypebeast, Wikipedia, and fan sites. The company also told me that “some systems” in this feature use machine learning to generate these summaries, meaning that “About Song” is partially generated by AI.
Like many other new Spotify features, the “About the Song” feature is only available to Premium subscribers. It’s also currently limited to English-language accounts in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia. If you have a Spotify subscription in one of these regions, finding this feature is easy. When listening to a song, simply scroll down until you see the “About the Song” card. If you don’t see it, it’s likely that song doesn’t support this feature. Some songs will only have one short card, but others may have more. If so, you’ll see icons in the upper right corner of the card window indicating which card you’re reading. You can swipe left on a card to open the next one.
I’ve seen songs with up to four such cards, though some songs may have even more. Some are based on a single source—for example, a single Wikipedia article—while others use multiple sources to create multiple “About the Song” cards. Each card has the option to rate the synopsis by liking or disliking it, suggesting they’re generated by AI. However, once generated, the synopses appear to remain static—when I exit the app and return, the descriptions are the same. I’d be interested to know whether the descriptions are the same for everyone who selects a song, or if they’re generated for each individual listener.
Spotify had a busy week. On Thursday , the day before the “About the Song” announcement, the company announced plans to begin selling physical books that sync with digital audiobooks. The day before, Spotify updated its lyrics display feature, adding the ability to download lyrics for offline viewing.