Spotify Just Built a Discovery Map Disguised as a Credits Button

Spotify announced "SongDNA" today. The new feature surfaces interactive credits for writers, producers, collaborators, samples, interpolations, and covers directly inside the Now Playing view. It is rolling out to Premium users globally right now and will be fully live by April.

The database powering this is WhoSampled. Spotify quietly bought them last year, and now the strategy is obvious. This is a metadata infrastructure play. Whoever owns the map of musical relationships controls discovery. TIDAL got to interactive credits first, but they do not have the scale to make the data dictate listening habits globally.

Artists and rightsholders manage the information themselves through Spotify for Artists. Songwriters and producers finally get the upfront visibility they have been denied in the streaming era, but Spotify gets the real prize. They own the connective tissue between every sample, writer, and collaborator on the platform. The credits button is just the interface. The real product is the map.