Spotify — “About the Song”

Launched in beta Feb 6: an AI blurb under every track, scraped from “third-party sources,” sold as bringing the story to the listener. On Jul 16 Lorde posted the one written about her own song — it described a staging that happens in a different song, lifted from an error in an Australian tour review — and asked for an opt-out. Spotify’s answer was that it’s still in beta. Same month the company said it pulled 75 million spam tracks in a year. So the platform is drowning in machine output and its fix is to put more machine output directly under the work. The note beside the record is not decoration; it is the last place a human decides what the thing means. Give that away and there is no room left to be right about anything.