A mid-verse curiosity, answered without leaving your phone.
Spotify this week began rolling out About the Song, a beta feature that tucks bite-sized stories, trivia and context beneath the Now Playing view. The company says the cards — short, swipeable summaries drawn from third-party sources — let listeners peek behind a track’s inspiration, credits and studio moments while a song plays. You can rate each card with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and both artists and listeners can submit feedback during the beta.
Spotify’s own announcement explains how to find the feature in the app: open Now Playing on mobile, scroll down to the About the Song card on supported tracks, and swipe through the stories. The beta is English-only for Premium users across the U.S., U.K., Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia. For full details see Spotify’s post: About the Song (beta).
How it works (and what’s new)
At launch, the content is summarized from third-party sources and presented as quick, digestible cards — think modern liner notes that don’t interrupt playback. Spotify says machine learning helps generate the text, and the cards include sourcing information so listeners can see where the narrative came from. Early reports also note the cards are limited to a selection of supported tracks for now; Spotify plans to expand availability over time.
This isn’t Spotify’s first attempt to surface context around music. The company has been layering more metadata into the experience — expanded Song Credits, SongDNA, and last year’s purchase of WhoSampled have all fed into a broader effort to show who made a song and how it connects to other work. About the Song sits alongside those moves, but aims for a lighter, swipe-first experience rather than line-by-line annotations.
Why context matters now
Streaming platforms are competing on more than just catalogs and playlists. Features that deepen engagement — whether that’s better credits, richer editorial notes or discoverable backstories — can nudge listeners to explore an artist’s catalog or come back more often. That logic underpins Spotify’s push; the company has been on a cadence of updates lately, including improvements to lyrics, audiobook tools and developer APIs.
The trend extends beyond Spotify. Apple has been iterating on podcast and audio features for years, and recent platform enhancements show a broader industry appetite for richer audio experiences — for example Apple’s ongoing upgrades to podcast tools and chapters. See how audio apps are evolving in Apple Podcasts in iOS 26.2 Adds Auto‑Generated Chapters, Timed Links and Better Episode Links.
At the same time, the rise of generative tools in media production and summarization makes features like About the Song technically feasible. Big tech’s push into AI — from text-to-image models to on-device assistants — has lowered the barrier for generating concise, sourced copy at scale. For context about how fast AI tooling is moving across companies, consider Microsoft’s recent work on in-house models like MAI-Image-1, which illustrates how platforms are investing in generative systems internally.
Accuracy, sourcing and the moderation question
One obvious friction point is accuracy. Summaries harvested and condensed from outside sources need careful attribution and a path for correction. Spotify has built a feedback loop into the cards, but scaling editorial oversight across millions of tracks is hard. The risk is familiar: small errors in a liner-note blurb can spread quickly if they’re surfaced constantly in an app people use daily.
There are also competitive dynamics at play. Past efforts such as Behind the Lyrics leaned on partnerships for annotations and sometimes drew criticism for tone and accuracy. Spotify’s current approach — summarized, sourced cards with feedback controls — feels designed to be faster and more scalable, but it will likely evolve as the company tests what listeners engage with and what artists want to control.
Where you’ll see it today
Right now About the Song is a mobile-first, Premium-only experiment in English across six markets. If you don’t see the card on a track, it may simply not be supported yet; Spotify is deliberately seeding the feature to test both technical scale and how useful listeners find the stories.
If Spotify can balance speed with trustworthy sourcing, About the Song could become the easiest way for casual listeners to learn a little more about a track without breaking the flow of a playlist. For artists and labels, it’s another place to shape narrative around releases — and for listeners, it’s an invitation to treat each play as a prompt to learn something new.
For the moment, the cards are small experiments. But in a streaming world where attention is the real currency, giving a song a short, meaningful backstory could be the nudge that makes someone press play again.