Lorde is done with Spotify's AI song notes — 'we don't want this'
Lorde publicly called out About the Song, Spotify's AI feature that explains tracks, after it pinned a story on the wrong song. Spotify pulled the text and defended the beta.
The newest front in the war between artists and artificial intelligence opened in the unlikeliest place: Spotify’s little context box. Lorde took to her Instagram stories to tear into About the Song, the AI feature that summarises “the story behind” each track — after the tool credited her with a story that belonged to a different song.
What is Spotify’s About the Song feature?
It’s a beta feature, rolled out to a limited group of users in February, that compiles information from third-party sources to give context to whatever’s playing. The trouble, in Lorde’s case, was the AI mixing up its index cards: the “performance piece” it described didn’t belong to the song on screen but to GRWM. “Not only is this inaccurate,” she wrote, “but reducing a song to an AI-generated meaning right at the source feels like it limits free interpretation.” Then she boiled the mood down to a sentence: “I’m going to go out on a limb and say we don’t want this” — along with a concrete ask, that artists be able to opt out.
How did Spotify respond?
Quickly, and in firefighting mode: the offending text was removed, and the company noted About the Song is a beta that presents cited information from across the internet. “When something’s off, we move fast to fix it, like we did here. Getting it right matters to us,” a spokesperson said — the platform’s official line lives at the Spotify newsroom. The fix doesn’t close the underlying question Lorde nailed: who controls a song’s narrative, the artist or the algorithm? It’s the same question running through the whole industry, from music to video streaming, where generative AI is already deep inside production.
Between an ambiguous lyric and an automatic explanation, Lorde would rather the doubt stay ours. Hard to argue — half the fun of a song has always been fighting about what it means.
By Lucy Bennett
Image: Raph_PH / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
