Spotify’s new features allow listeners to explore the people and stories behind their favorite music

On Wednesday, Spotify was announced new features designed to showcase the people behind users’ favorite music, including producers, engineers, songwriters, singers and more. The company will also release tools that show how songs are connected and what inspired them.

The second set of tools is presented in a new, interactive feature called SongDNA, which shows which songs are sampled in a particular track, who arranged the tune, and what other projects the song’s collaborators may have been involved with.

TechCrunch reported in October that Spotify developed the SongDNA feature as a way to help users discover music through a song’s credits, after references to the feature were spotted in the app’s code by reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong. With SongDNA, Spotify users could explore the other projects that artists, musicians, and others who worked on a track are involved with.

Previously, the Song Credits feature only featured top performance, songwriting, and production credits.

References to sampled music, meanwhile, come from the community-created WhoSampled online database, which Spotify has acquired. In particular, the streaming service TIDAL also offers interactive credits which allows users to explore music through the contributors behind the songs.

Spotify has also planned a feature called “About the song” that will allow listeners to explore scannable cards in the “Now Playing” view. These cards will offer details such as what inspired the song, the stories behind the music, the cultural impact and more. These stories come from third-party resources, which will be linked to the cards.

This type of background information about music is something that Spotify has offered in previous years, when it partnered with lyrics site Genius on a feature that offered details about the backgrounds of certain tracks. However, this feature was limited to those stories that Genius had in its database. The upcoming feature will link to various places on the web, screenshots will be displayed, including informational sites like Wikipedia, as well as news websites.

Spotify says expanded Song Credits will roll out starting Wednesday on mobile and will roll out to desktop in the coming months.

SongDNA and About the Song will only be available to Premium subscribers. However, these features won’t roll out until early next year, initially as Spotify for Artists Preview. This will allow those in the music business to have a chance to preview the features first and ensure the titles are accurate before they are released to the wider public.