YouTube Music is transformed: lyrics available, but why only with Premium if Spotify offers them for free?

Last week, Spotify revealed the global expansion of the lyrics feature in many countries and now allows offline access for Premium users. YouTube has decided to adopt a similar strategyalthough this will be behind a payment barrier.

The curious thing about this new lyrics functionality on YouTube Music is that now it is necessary to have a subscription to YouTube Premium o Music Premium to be able to enjoy it.

In the current playback interface, a new card on top which indicates “You have x views left” and “Unlock the lyrics with Premium”, as part of the YouTube Premium news.

YouTube offers up to five free viewsafter which only the first lines of the letters will be shown, with the rest being blurred and without the possibility of continuing to see them.

According to 9to5Googlethis new YouTube functionality is being implemented both in Spain and in the rest of the world, and Google has been testing it for several months.

The fact that five letters can be unlocked is an option designed for the occasional user who wants to check the lyrics of a song by their favorite artist at any given time, but not for someone who wants to use this feature regularly to learn the lyrics or even sing.

If Spotify has improved the lyrics experience in its app with a major update, available to both free and paid users, it is because, despite its popularity, it can afford the cost of the necessary licenses.

The reason why YouTube Premium has decided to make lyrics part of its premium subscription is mainly due to the costs associated with lyric licensing.

Musixmatch and LyricFind already have agreements with record labels and they charge the platforms a fee for the legal use of this data, as well as for their ability to sync it with the music during playback.

Here Spotify has more flexibility thanks to its huge user base, which it recently announced amounts to more than 750 million monthly users.

YouTube Lyrics’ strategy of offering five free lyrics is not bad at all, although it is not clear if these are daily or when the counter is reset to enjoy more lyrics.

In Spain, YouTube Music Premium has a price of 9.99 euros per month, which includes ad-free streaming, offline downloads and background playback.

If we choose to pay 13.99 euros per month, we can extend those benefits to the YouTube app with YouTube Premium.

Google currently has more than 325 million subscribers across its various consumer services, including Google One and YouTube Premium.