After more than a year of testing, Spotify is rolling out real-time lyrics to all users worldwide. In June 2020, Spotify announced a trial run of the feature showing lyrics that were automatically timed and synced with a song. The test was limited to only 26 countries in parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America, as well as in India. Although this was the first official confirmation from the music streaming giant, it began testing real-time lyrics a year prior with a smaller group of users in markets including Canada, Indonesia, and Mexico.
Lyrics to a song can be found on a widget at the bottom of the player UI, where Behind the Lyrics would appear previously. At the bottom of this pane is a new Share button that allows sharing of lyrics externally, adding another means of social expression in Spotify. The options are currently limited to Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram Stories at the moment. It will automatically scroll lyrics in a karaoke-like fashion as a song moves forward, and just like the app itself — although line-by-line instead of word-by-word.
In a blog post, Spotify notes the lyrics feature will be available "across the majority" of its library. The feature is powered by Musixmatch, a popular lyrics provider that automatically detects a song and shows its lyrics in an overlay window. It will be available on all platforms where Spotify has an app and to all users, whether using free or paid plans. Although it shies from sharing an exact number, Musixmatch claims to offer lyrics to over 8 million songs. Understandably, lyrics are provided either by the artist or transcribed by fans but service providers like Musixmatch require licenses to use them. On its website, Musixmatch notes these lyrics are sourced through agreements with major music labels including Sony/ATV-EMI, Warner Chappell, Universal Music Publishing Group, Walt Disney Publishing, and others.
Free Lyrics For All
Similar to Spotify's deal with Musixmatch, companies with top alternatives to Spotify have partnered with other lyrics providers for similar solutions. Lyrics in Amazon Music are powered by two providers — Musixmatch and LyricFind — and the latter also provides lyrics for Pandora. Apple Music, on the other hand, has an exclusive partnership with Genius to provide lyrics to its users. Interestingly, before Genius scored an exclusive deal for Apple Music, it powered Spotify's Behind the Lyrics feature, which showed stories around the songwriting process for a particular track.
With this development, Spotify will show real-time lyrics to users in every market across the world. Contrastingly, lyrics in Sportify were previously provided by SyncPower in Japan and it remains to be seen if it continues to use the same service. Notably, lyrics are not downloaded as part of the song and will not be available in offline mode. A transcription feature would have also been nice to have for free and subscription-based podcasts on Spotify. For the time being, automatic lyrics will be available on mobile operating systems — Android and iOS, the Spotify Desktop app, and other large-screen platforms including Android TV, Amazon FireTV, Comcast, LG's WebOS, Playstation consoles, Roku, Samsung's TizenOS, Sky, and Xbox One with no difference for free and Spotify premium users. To enjoy the feature, make sure Spotify is updated to the latest version.
Source: Spotify