Sometimes listening to music just isn’t enough, and part of the streaming experience for a lot of music enthusiasts is digging beneath the surface of the songs and albums they love the most, which is why Spotify’s SongDNA is one of my favorite new features to come from the service.
It’s not the first music streamer to do this, however. Tidal Credits has been around since 2019, but SongDNA adds a layer of depth to Spotify’s playback tools, and after spending ample time testing the waters, I’ve decided that I simply can’t get enough. Here’s how my first hands-on went down.
An endless sonic encyclopaedia
That’s what SongDNA is in a nutshell. Ever since it was leaked back in October, I’ve been waiting patiently for SongDNA to drop, and when more users started seeing it in beta last month, I knew it was near. It basically runs like a mindmap, spotlighting every collaborator behind a song from composers to lyricists, producers to sound engineers, and it’s designed for ultimate music fans who want to get to know their favorite songs on a deeper level.
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First off, SongDNA is very easy to find and use. You just tap any song you want to listen to, and scroll down in the playback page to find SongDNA under Lyrics. You don’t need to be listening to the song to explore SongDNA either, and you can just tap the three-dot icon on any song and explore it that way, though I found the experience to be smoother when you use it while listening to the song you’re researching.
But where SongDNA shines is how it connects artists and producers through an intertwining web of information, and just when I thought I knew everything about my favorite songs, SongDNA put me in my place.
While listening to Jessie Ware’s song Ride, one of my favorite new releases, not only did I discover more about its producer, James Ford, but SongDNA connected Jessie Ware to artists including Arctic Monkeys, Florence and the Machine, and Depeche Mode just through this one producer. Not only that, it showed me Björk served as a songwriter on one of Madonna’s biggest hits back in the ‘90s.
I often find myself falling into Wikipedia black holes, accumulating knowledge on some of the most niche and unhinged topics, so SongDNA is perfect for this. But aside from its list of collaborators, it tells you what samples and interpolations are being used. This is where it really caught my attention.
Peeling back the layers
Sampling and interpolating other songs is a very common way of adding depth to a song, but for me, it offers a clear view of an artist’s creative mindset. It’s a great feeling to recognize a sample right off the bat, but I didn’t know how many songs I listen to have samples woven in.
When you press the play icon on a song from the samples and interpolations list, it takes you to the exact timestamp of the song to show you exactly what instrument, hook, riff, or melody is being used. The only setback with this, however, is that it doesn’t give you the option of listening to the sample as a snippet. Instead, it overrides what you’re currently listening to in the playback bar — but this is easy to get past.
Going back to the Jessie Ware example, the opening of her song Ride interpolates the theme from the movie The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), which I was totally oblivious to, and the same goes for SZA sampling Björk’s vocals from Hidden Place on the song Forgiveless.
I wanted to explore this even further, and there was one album in particular I knew would be rich with samples and interpolations: Beyoncé’s Lemonade. Although I’ve listened to it religiously over the past 10 years, it turns out I didn’t know as much about its production as I thought.
The song Sorry, an upbeat pop-RnB anthem with trap elements, interpolates the riff of one of the most famous pieces of classical music, Swan Lake, but because of how it’s re-shaped and crafted to fit the song, you’d never recognize it. I was truly shocked, but it didn’t end there.
Her song Hold Up, another favorite of mine, is also packed with samples. While most of them are easy to spot (mainly the vocal sample of Soulja Boy’s Turn My Swag On), there’s one that’s been lurking in the background I didn’t pick up on until now — she samples her own song Countdown. We love a self-referential queen.
It’s safe to say that my experience using SongDNA for the first time was a hit, and I’m ready to welcome it into my music streaming regimen with open arms. Apparently, you can teach an old dog new tricks after all.
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rowan.davies@futurenet.com (Rowan Davies)
