Spotify launches SongDNA to map song connections

On Tuesday, Spotify announced the global rollout of SongDNA, a new feature designed to let listeners more deeply explore the connections behind their favorite music. Now available in beta to Premium subscribers—Spotify’s paid subscription tier—on iOS and Android devices, the feature provides an interactive experience that allows users to trace components of a song beyond the primary singer, songwriter, or musician. With SongDNA, listeners can explore connections such as who has covered a song, alongside details on samples, interpolations, and the other projects a song’s collaborators have been involved in.

The new feature serves as an expansion of Spotify’s existing “About the Song” feature, which allows users to view basic song credits. By offering a more detailed look at the writers, producers, and collaborators behind each track, the tool could help music fans see how artists are connected to and influenced by one another’s work. For professionals within the music industry, the feature could also help them find new collaborators, producers, and engineers. Additionally, it aims to give background contributors more visibility and credibility than they have typically received in the streaming era.

To support the launch, Jacqueline Ankner, Spotify’s head of Songwriter & Publisher Partnerships, stated: “By bringing collaborators, samples, and covers together in one place, we’re making it easier for fans to discover new music and see how songs connect and come to life—while giving songwriters, producers, and rightsholders meaningful recognition for the role they play in creating it,”

The rollout follows a development cycle first reported by TechCrunch in October, after references to the feature were spotted in the app’s code by Jane Manchun Wong, a reverse engineer—a person who analyzes software code to discover hidden features. The following month, Spotify officially confirmed its plans to launch the feature. The tool is built in part on top of data from WhoSampled, an online music database that Spotify acquired last year. With this launch, Spotify competes more directly with TIDAL, a rival music streaming service that offers its own interactive credits feature focusing on the contributors behind streamed tracks. The global rollout is planned to be complete sometime in April.

Why it matters

Spotify is shifting from a passive listening platform to a more granular discovery tool, giving background contributors like producers and songwriters more visibility while deepening fan engagement.