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Spotify to Launch Real-Time Lyrics Support in 26 Countries

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Spotify today launches its real-time lyrics feature in 26 worldwide markets including India, countries in Southeast Asia, and Latin America, according to TechCrunch.

spotifylogo.png

In mobile Spotify apps that receive the update, users can tap the Lyrics card at the bottom of the Now Playing screen, and lyrics scroll across the screen in time to the music, allowing listeners to read them or even sing along in real time.

The following countries will reportedly get the new real-time lyrics feature from 10am ET on Tuesday: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, El Salvador, Uruguay, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

The launch is happening thanks to a new agreement with lyrics provider Musixmatch, which was also the source for the lyrics tests conducted last year. Previously, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Mexico included some lyrics support from other providers.

TechCrunch notes that Canadian users who also reported they could use the lyrics feature in last year's trials will no longer have access to it when the support rolls out to other markets later today.

It's currently unknown whether the new real-time lyrics feature will expand to additional markets anytime soon, but it's hard to imagine Spotify not bringing it to the U.S. and other major Western markets when the necessary licensing agreements are made.

Apple Music gained a similar real-time lyrics feature with the release of iOS 13 last September and macOS Catalina 10.15.4 in March this year.

Article Link: Spotify to Launch Real-Time Lyrics Support in 26 Countries
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/30/spotify-launching-real-time-lyrics-26-countries/
What is with that country list, I mean no offence to them but seems odd. Licence issues or something like that?
 
Spotify's biggest market EU after reading the title: o_O:p😍🤪
After reading whole article: 😮
 
Excuse me the dumb question, I don’t really use or check the lyrics (my music is largely instrumental and electronic) but what’s “real-time” about it?
The few times I have pushed the lyrics button, they are... there, might be synced to the song, etc... like closed captions subtitles on movies which are pre computed, the song file (also pre-recorded) won’t change and suddenly sing with other words during your playback at that time requiring real-time change of the lyrics?
Or do they execute actual audio analysis in real-time and creates the lyrics to display out of it? (which makes sense if the artists aren’t providing lyrics with the song files and they need to be extracted for each of the millions of songs created by the minute)
 
amartinez1660 said:
Excuse me the dumb question, I don’t really use or check the lyrics (my music is largely instrumental and electronic) but what’s “real-time” about it?
The few times I have pushed the lyrics button, they are... there, might be synced to the song, etc... like closed captions subtitles on movies which are pre computed
Click to expand...

Yes, like that. In contrast to when it’s just a long text file without anything keeping it in sync (besides you manually scrolling to find where it is right now). You might be too young, but album booklets (when people bought physical media for music) just had static text printed on pages. And iTunes when that came around just had static text files for lyrics. Or if you go the route of searching for lyrics online, the only thing that moves automatically most of the time are the ads.
 
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LeeW said:
What is with that country list, I mean no offence to them but seems odd. Licence issues or something like that?
Click to expand...

probaby licenses. Over here you even have to pay a „copyright“ fee when buying a printer cuz you COULD potentially print out copyright protected lyrics
 
This used to be built into Spotify desktop with MusicXMatch lyrics a few years back until it got pulled for licensing.
 
For those who didn’t read the full article:

”It's currently unknown whether the new real-time lyrics feature will expand to additional markets anytime soon, but it's hard to imagine Spotify not bringing it to the U.S. and other major Western markets when the necessary licensing agreements are made.”
 
DinkThifferent said:
Unusual list of countries. Normally with feature rollouts it's always: USA, UK, Australia, Canada, EU, Asia, South America and so on

Good for them! Now they have the premier of this feature.
Click to expand...

Licenses and probably because Latin American and Southeast Asian countries have huge populations and still has room for more growth that NA/EU market. They’re becoming more of a priority now.
 
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PsykX said:
It was already there back in... 2016 maybe?
And then they removed it silently.
Click to expand...
Yep, was one of the reasons I eventually switched to Apple Music. Glad they're slowly bringing it back, hopefully it doesn't just vanish on people again.
 
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