Want to read the lyrics to a new song on YouTube Music? You’ll need a Premium subscription for that.
YouTube Music, Google’s music streaming service, is putting song lyrics behind a paywall for its Premium subscription. Free users will have limits on lyrics. The premium subscription costs $11 per month and is ad-free. The subscription lets you switch between audio and video and download music to listen offline.
A representative for YouTube didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Companies are jumping at every chance to nab your hard-earned money by stuffing popular features behind monthly subscriptions. Yet in most cases, the lyrics to a song are a free Google search away. Here’s what I found out about YouTube Music’s change and what’s still unknown.
News outlets and Reddit users say that free users will be able to view lyrics five times. When they try a sixth time, only the first two lines of the song are shown, with the rest blocked out. People see an ad informing them they’ve reached their limit of lyrics views and will need to upgrade to the premium version to access this feature.
YouTube Music isn’t alone in this. Spotify on Friday announced a new beta feature called About the Song, which provides people with trivia and background information for many tracks. In the same announcement, Spotify also said that only Premium users who download songs for offline listening will have access to lyrics for those tracks. And Apple Music offers time-synced lyrics for a karaoke-style experience, but only for its Premium users.
When will premium lyrics roll out?
A 9to5Google article reported that YouTube Music has already been testing this feature, but YouTube hasn’t confirmed the Premium subscription change or how long this change has been in the works.
There are also still questions about when the lyric limit will reset for free users and how soon this change will roll out for all users. I tested YouTube Music out for myself on Monday and haven’t noticed the change yet.
