It has not been the most flattering PR year for Spotify. Since last spring, popular bands like Deerhoof, Massive Attack, Sylvan Esso, King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard, Hotline TNT, and countless more have removed their music from the platform, with many of those artists calling out Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s investment in the AI military company Helsing. Then, Spotify doubled down on the ICE recruitment advertisements they began running on its free ad-supported tier, prompting even more artists to flee in protest. A lot of Spotify subscribers are fleeing, too, and Apple Music even launched a feature to make the transition easier for ex-Spotify listeners seeking an alternative. Now, Spotify has announced some competitive updates, including more in-depth song credits.
Spotify was already almost a decade old when Apple Music was founded in 2015, but the latter has usually had a leg up in marketing themselves to music nerds as opposed to the more passive listener. One way Apple Music has tried appealing to the Real Heads is its in-app credits feature: Not only can you see the main songwriters, but you can also easily see who plays what instruments as well as who produced, mixed, mastered, and engineered the song, as long as the labels and distributors made that information readily available. Spotify, meanwhile, could only broadly tell you the song’s writers and producers. (You can also usually access an album’s full credits by just purchasing the damn thing.)
Ostensibly in an effort to compete with Apple Music, Spotify will soon roll out an expanded Song Credits feature that, similarly, will show you detailed personnel information. They’ll also be introducing another new feature called SongDNA which “maps out connections between songs, showing collaborators, samples and covers all in one place.” SongDNA is powered by the site WhoSampled, which Spotify has just acquired. Lastly, Spotify will implement another new feature called About The Song, which… tells you miscellaneous context about the song.
Here’s Spotify spokesperson Charlie Puth explaining the updates:
