Spotify now lets you showcase your favourite music and stories behind it

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Spotify is rolling out a new set of features that basically says: what if your favorite songs came with their own behind-the-scenes documentary, minus the documentary? 

This week, the company announced a broader push to spotlight the unsung heroes of music, the producers, engineers, songwriters, background vocalists, and all the other folks who make artists sound like they definitely did not record in a closet.

At the center of the upgrade is SongDNA, an interactive feature that acts like a musical ancestry test. 

Tap into it, and Spotify will show you which songs were sampled, who has covered the track, and what other projects the contributors have been involved in. 

It’s basically IMDb for your playlist, minus the actor meltdowns. 

TechCrunch first spotted clues of this back in October, thanks to code sleuth Jane Manchun Wong, who uncovered references to the tool inside Spotify’s app. 

Now it’s official: your song-credit rabbit holes just got deeper.

Behind the sampling data is WhoSampled, the community-driven database Spotify quietly acquired, because nothing says “we care about transparency” like buying the internet’s favorite hub for sample nerds. 

Rival TIDAL offers something vaguely similar, but Spotify is clearly aiming for the deluxe, fully-immersive edition.

Then there’s About the Song, a new set of swipeable cards appearing in the Now Playing view. These will dish out stories about what inspired a track, its cultural footprint, and whatever other lore the internet has to offer. 

Instead of relying on a single partner like Genius, which previously powered Spotify’s “annotations-but-make-them-music,” the platform will pull from multiple outside sources. 

Yes, that includes Wikipedia. Yes, you might end up learning your favorite breakup song was actually written about a sandwich. Anything’s possible.

Expanded Song Credits start rolling out on Wednesday on mobile, with desktop following later. 

But the headliners, SongDNA and About the Song, won’t hit users until early next year. And even then, they’ll be locked behind the Premium subscription door. 

Before the public gets a peek, artists and collaborators will test-drive everything through Spotify for Artists Preview, presumably to check for typos, missing mixers, and that one background vocalist everyone forgets.