YouTube Music Has Placed Song Lyrics Behind a Paywall.
My subscription fatigue is real, but ultimately, I understand that companies need to make money. If one manages to create a compelling set of features at a reasonable price, I can decide whether the value is worth it. That’s okay. It’s not okay to offer a feature for free for years and then suddenly decide to make it paid.
It seems YouTube isn’t aware of this. Starting Saturday, outlets like 9to5Google began reporting that YouTube Music had begun removing the ability to view lyrics for free users. If you want full access to lyrics, you’ll need a subscription to YouTube Music Premium or YouTube Premium (the latter includes Music Premium). The service hasn’t completely cut off these users. According to user reports, YouTube Music opens lyrics for free users for five songs per month . After playing the sixth song, they’ll only have access to the first two lines of each song, as the rest of the lyrics will be blurred out. These users will have to wait until next month to see lyrics for the next five songs.
There seems to be no doubt as to why the lyrics are blurred. When you go to the “Lyrics” tab in YouTube Music with a free account, a new banner appears showing how many views you have remaining. Below it, you’ll see the option “Unlock Lyrics with Premium,” which clearly indicates that without paying, you’ll only get a limited number of lyrics views. This apparently follows months of testing the lyrics feature in YouTube Music as being available only to Premium subscribers.
Incidentally, when I tried to test the lyric display feature in my free YouTube Music app, the service gave me two weeks of a free Premium subscription with no cancellation option. While this is certainly nice of YouTube, since I already have an Apple Music subscription, the only real consequence is that I can’t test these new lyric display restrictions.
Free music services that offer song lyrics.
I don’t see any strategy here. I don’t think people would pay specifically for lyrics, but they might be so upset by their loss that they’ll look for alternatives. For example, Spotify offers full access to lyrics for free users. Just a week ago, the company added the ability to download lyrics for offline use only for Premium users , but even that was an addition to subscribers, not a removal of an existing feature for free users.
And it’s not just Spotify. Other free music streaming services also offer lyrics, including Pandora, Amazon Music Free, and Freefy. These are primarily radio services, so you might not have as many options as with the free version of YouTube Music—but at least they have lyrics.
Losing lyrics isn’t the end of the world for free YouTube Music users. Lyrics for almost any song can be found online. Sometimes, lyrics appear in the Google search bar even without clicking the link. Otherwise, there are websites like Genius and AZLyrics . It’s just a shame that YouTube feels the need to restrict access to content within the app.