Photo: Piotr Piatrouski (Shutterstock)
Spotify and Apple Music may be great for music discovery, but they don’t do a great job telling you more about who you’re listening to. You could know every lyric to “Don’t Stop Believin’,” but if you don’t know what year it came out, you’re going to let your trivia team down. (It’s 1981, by the way.)
NowPlaying is an app that wants to become the encyclopedia of music trivia. It gives you more information about the song, album, artist, or band you’re listening to, and goes into some pretty great details along the way—including where the song or album was recorded, and the names of all of the musicians who worked on any track.
The app listens to songs playing around you, or links with your Apple Music account to pick up songs from your playing history, which makes it pretty convenient to look up trivia. It packages that information in a nice interface, as well.
To give you a sample of what you can expect, we looked up Green Day’s song “Holiday” using NowPlaying. Its liner notes include the story of how Green Day was out of ideas and had an upcoming album’s masters stolen before the band started work on the album American Idiot. From there, it goes on to talk about the album itself and has a paragraph for each of its biggest hits.
You can also use the app to see the lyrics of any song, provided by Genius. It won’t be a new feature for Apple Music users, but at least you don’t need to leave to app to follow along with the singer.
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NowPlaying is good with popular artists and albums, but it comes up short when you go look up obscure ones. The app has plenty of details to keep you hooked, but its database should expand for it to become the gold mine of trivia that it wants to be. You can download NowPlaying for free. If you want to access additional content and remove ads, it has a $10/year subscription fee.
