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Spotify’s Song Psychic feature is like a Magic 8 Ball for music

Derek Malcolm
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An image of a hand on a smartphone showing Spotify's Song Psychic feature.
Spotify

Music streaming behemoth Spotify is leaning hard into this year’s leap day, using the once-every-four-years phenomenon as a springboard for its new Song Psychic feature that, like a Magic 8 Ball, serves up a song suggestion for all of your burning (or not-so-burning) questions.

Spotify is excellent at regularly adding fun features to its music streaming interfaces, such as its hugely popular year-end review Spotify Wrapped, collaborative playlists, and algorithm-based DJ. Today the company is at it again with Song Psychic that it’s calling “a new, mystical music experience.” They even enlisted the help of American rapper Baby Tate to help with the launch with this TikTok video.

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Spotify users can go to spotify.com/songpsychic on their mobile devices (heading there on a computer browser serves up a QR code for scanning and prompts you to use your mobile phone), or you can search for Song Psychic in the Spotify app. Either way, the psychedelic Song Psychic experience launches in the Spotify app. There, you’re served up nine topics for your questions, including Love, Career, Life’s Greatest Mysteries, My Future, and my favorite, Lunch.

Screengrabs from Spotify's Song Psychic feature.
Spotify

Choosing your topic opens you up to a list of pre-populated question, like “Should pineapple go on a pizza?,” or, for those looking for love, “Does my crush like me back?” You can also ask your own questions. Hit enter, and the app generates a song that will give you the answer you seek … or not. In our case, Song Psychic answered the pizza debate with Lily Allen’s Never Gonna Happen and reassured me that my wife still loves me with Muse’s Yes Please. You can then click the track and listen to the suggested song on Spotify.

Screengrabs from Spotify's Song Psychic feature.
Spotify

Will Spotify’s 226 million subscribers and 570-plus monthly active listeners use Song Psychic as a tool for making important life decisions? I sincerely hope not. But at the very least, the new feature, like many of Spotify’s efforts to increase user engagement, can serve as a fun way to discover new music and be a revamped Magic 8 Ball with you and your friends.

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Derek Malcolm
Derek Malcolm
Contributing Editor, A/V
Derek Malcolm is a Toronto-based technology journalist, editor, and content specialist whose work has appeared in…
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