Google’s ‘Now Playing’ feature for Pixel phones to give deeper insights into the songs you hear

The ‘Now Playing’ feature on your Pixel phone is one of those niceties that you forget about 99% of the time, but that 1% of the time when you’re at a restaurant and someone asks what song you think this is and you glance over at your phone and say “hehe, this is Happy by NF”, cleverly raising your eyebrows as they praise your amazing pop culture chops, it’s worth having. (By the way, if you haven’t heard this song yet, you’re missing out!)

While it’s been around for several years, it’s remained relatively unchanged. Now Playing simply captures audio a la Shazam (remember that?) from your environment and plasters the track and artist name on the bottom of your phone’s ambient display. Later on, you can go through the notification to a list of what’s been captured in the past, and it provides you with a fun little look back.

Most recently, you’ve been able to “favorite” songs you really like, and of course, you can tap through to YouTube Music to save a special track to your library if you can’t get it out of your head. Again, utilitarian, but a welcome feature nonetheless. Coming up, Google is working on a stats page that will effectively transform everything captured by Now Playing into a wall of information to give you deeper insights into what you’ve been hearing and how frequently (kudos: 9to5Google).

Credit: Kieron Quinn on Twitter and 9to5Google

It will tell you how many tracks from how many artists and under how many genres you’ve heard in the last month, show you the exact breakdown via a colorful pie chart, and even tell you which songs you’ve heard the most among other stats.

This is all encapsulated in a new ‘Summary’ tab on the bottom navigation right next to the “History” and “Favorites” tabs that always sat there. While we don’t yet know when this will roll out to everyone, it’s likely to be a part of the new phone’s launch. My bet is that with all feature drops, this one will be exclusive to the new handset for a time before becoming widely available to all previous Pixel generations. This upcoming change was first spotted by Kieron Quinn on Twitter.

As Google continues to innovate and enhance the Now Playing feature, Pixel users can look forward to an even more immersive and informative music discovery experience, even if it is only something you use to impress your friends or satiate curiosity once in a blue moon.