On my Android phone, for as long as I can remember, I can do an "audio search" which allows me to identify songs playing in my vicinity a la "Shazam." This also worked passively from my lock screen, which is... fine. Whatever.
I just got an Android update which included mention of a new feature which sounds like the same exact feature, but now it's started reporting unrelated songs to the songs that are playing.
Bzzt! Wrong answer. The track is Ronnie Foster's instrumental cover of Al Green's Let's Stay Together. Idiot.
I can't say the melody here is obscure so what the absolute fuck, Google.
This seems objectively worse than back in the napster days where tracks would be wildly misattributed to unrelated artists that might have had a similar sound.
The "now playing" tech is largely pay to play (aka payola). It's a form of advertising (duh).
Owen Nelson