Spotify is rolling out About the Song, a new feature that brings AI-generated liner notes to Premium subscribers. The beta launch taps machine learning to pull trivia and background stories from third-party sources, presenting them as swipeable cards in the Now Playing view. It's a modest but telling move as streaming platforms hunt for ways to deepen engagement beyond just hitting play.
Spotify just turned your music player into a mini encyclopedia. The company announced About the Song today, a beta feature that serves up AI-generated context cards while you listen. Premium subscribers can now scroll down in the Now Playing view to find trivia, backstories, and production details about tracks - think digital liner notes, but generated on the fly.
The feature pulls information from third-party sources and uses machine learning to package it into short, swipeable cards. Spotify at least cites its sources on each card, addressing one of the bigger criticisms of AI-generated content. But the company stayed quiet on key details, declining to say whether free users will eventually get access or when the beta might graduate to full release.
Right now, About the Song only works for a limited number of tracks. Spotify says it plans to expand coverage, but didn't offer a timeline. That measured rollout makes sense - the feature needs solid source material, and that takes time to aggregate and process at scale.
This isn't Spotify's first swing at adding context around music. The company rolled out expanded Song Credits and SongDNA late last year, giving listeners deeper info about the producers, writers, and session musicians behind their favorite tracks. Those features also map connections between artists, showing how collaborators and influences weave through music history.
The real catalyst came in November 2025, when Spotify acquired WhoSampled, the go-to database for sample credits and interpolations. That acquisition handed Spotify a massive repository of music DNA - who sampled what, which beats trace back to which breaks, and how hip-hop producers and electronic artists have recycled and reimagined sounds across decades.
