Streaming services make it easy to listen to music many But they don’t necessarily tell us much about the song itself. You can see how long each track is, who played it, and in some cases even songwriting credits, but you don’t know that. why Whether the artist wrote the song or what each song means. Of course, you can also scour the Internet and read articles and blogs to learn more about your favorite music. Or you can skim through Spotify’s new summary card, which provides interesting facts about each track.
Spotify announced a new feature Friday called “About the Song.” This feature is starting in beta and is available in the Now Playing view of the app. Selecting this will reveal a story card that you can swipe to learn more about the song you’re listening to. Spotify says the stories are summarized from “third-party sources,” and in my testing, I’ve seen sources like Hypebeast, Wikipedia, and fan sites. The company also said that “some systems” in the feature use machine learning to generate these summaries, meaning that parts of About the Song are generated by AI.
Credit: Spotify
Like many new features on Spotify, About the Song is only available to premium subscribers. At this time, it is also limited to English-language accounts in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia. If you paid for Spotify in one of these regions, this feature is very easy to find. While listening to a song, scroll down the page until you see the “About Song” card. If it doesn’t appear, the song may not support this feature. Some songs have only one summary card, while others may have more. If so, an icon will appear in the top right corner of the card window to indicate which card you are reading. Swipe a card to the left to open the next card.
I’ve seen songs with as many as four of these cards, but some songs may have more. Some of these are all summarized from the same source (for example, a single Wikipedia article), while others are pulled from multiple sources to produce multiple “About the Song” cards. Each card has “agree” and “disagree” options to rate the summary, suggesting that they are generated by an AI. However, once generated, the summary appears to be static. Even if you exit the app and return, the overview is the same. I would like to know if the summary is the same for everyone who selects a song, or if it is generated for each individual listener.
What do you think so far?
Spotify has had a busy week. On Thursday, the day before announcing “About the Song,” the company revealed plans to begin selling physical paperbacks to sync with digital audiobooks. A day earlier, Spotify revamped its lyrics feature, adding the option to download lyrics and listen to them offline.
