YouTube Music Rolling Out Premium Paywall for Song Lyrics

[MacRumors]

YouTube Music is making users pay for lyrics. Originally introduced in 2020 as a free feature, song lyrics now sit behind a paywall – as part of a YouTube Premium or Music Premium subscription.

As spotted by 9to5Google, in the latest update currently rolling out, the Lyrics tab on the Now Playing screen displays the warning message, "You have [x] views remaining. Unlock lyrics with Premium."

Users get five free lyrics before a subscription is required. After that, users only see the first few lines, while the rest are blurred.

Google has been testing the change with a small subset of users for a few months already, and now it appears to be rolling out globally. Google has yet to confirm the change.

YouTube Music Premium costs $10.99 per month, and includes ad-free playback, offline downloads, and background listening. YouTube Premium, priced at $13.99, brings those benefits to the YouTube app.

It's possible that Google is trying to claw back costs paid to third-party services like LyricFind and MusixMatch, which the app seems to be using to retrieve lyrics. Whether the strategy outlives previous attempts by streamers to make users pay extra for the feature remains to be seen.

Last year, Spotify briefly put lyrics behind a paywall, but it rolled back the move after a user backlash.

Article Link: YouTube Music Rolling Out Premium Paywall for Song Lyrics

 

[froot1988]

tech is getting worse every day

 

[aries81]

Most of the time you can find the lyrics in the comments anyways.

 

[weckart]

Charging for linking to what people upload for free to Genius, Musicmatch and Lyricsfind is what I call a business opportunity.

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

I mean, apple music doesnt even let you listen to a single song if you don't pay. hell, you can't even acccess your playlist last I checked, so if you want to check some songs names, you're boned

 

[fatTribble]

tech is getting worse every day

Sadly, I often feel that way. It’s not really the future many of us hoped for or envisioned.

 

[Kar98]

I mean, apple music doesnt even let you listen to a single song if you don't pay. hell, you can't even acccess your playlist last I checked, so if you want to check some songs names, you're boned

Oh no.

Anyway…

 

[Kar98]

Sadly, I often feel that way. It’s not really the future many of us hoped for or envisioned.

Cory Doctorow has something to say on the subject.

 

[nuff_said]

Sadly, I often feel that way. It’s not really the future many of us hoped for or envisioned.

Only the capitalists envisioned this.

 

[Dj64Mk7]

No, Google! Don’t throw away your shred of the appearance of good will yet!

 

[Ctrlos]

*Google's lyrics in web browser*

 

[klasma]

Most of the time you can find the lyrics in the comments anyways.

Came here to post this.

Apart from that, YouTube Music is my preferred music streaming service anyway. User uploads being included is a killer feature. So often I read YouTube comments “I wish this was on Spotify/Apple Music/… 😭”.

 

[cicalinarrot]

The honeymoon's over, the nice low-cost trial periods are about to end.
Turns out they only existed to destroy the competition and now we'll have to pay full price.

 

[lusty]

I’m confused. I would be quite prepared to pay for lyrics and videos to be removed from Spotify. Perhaps I should move to YouTube and stop paying! Now if only someone would start pushing AI slop into a premium tier my life would be vastly improved.

 

[magamo]

If this move is to pay a fair amount to artists, I'm happy with it. If this is to make money out of thin air, i.e., AI-generated lyrics, Google can die in a fire.

 

[weckart]

If this move is to pay a fair amount to artists, I'm happy with it. If this is to make money out of thin air, i.e., AI-generated lyrics, Google can die in a fire.

artists get nothing. I have seen lyrics I submitted come up in YT Music.

 

[Techwatcher]

This is stupid as f*ck.

 

[Plutonius]

I guess we will have to ask Siri 🙂.

 

[Xade]

Of course they are.

 

[robd003]

Google literally broke search a few years ago so that users would click on pages 2 & 3 to find what they were looking for so they could show people more ads.

When your entire product is "**** the customer" you're absolutely inviting the competition to eat your lunch.

 

[DEMinSoCAL]

Charging for linking to what people upload for free to Genius, Musicmatch and Lyricsfind is what I call a business opportunity.

Are you referring to Genius. Musicmatch and Lyricsfind? Because it sounds like it's those companies that are charging YT Music to use their service of freely uploaded lyrics. I'm guessing those companies don't exist to give their service for free...

 

[ikramerica]

So charging for captions? ADA anyone?

 

[TFrank2]

Cory Doctorow has something to say on the subject.

Came here to say the same thing. Every quarter it gets worse and worse.

 

[SBlue1]

Still the best Music service for me. Don't need any lyrics anyway, give me guitar chords instead! 🙂 I just wish my HomePod minis would be able to play YouTube Music.

 

[DeftwillP]

tech is getting worse every day

en********ation