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YouTube Music Rolling Out Premium Paywall for Song Lyrics

weckart said:
Charging for linking to what people upload for free to Genius, Musicmatch and Lyricsfind is what I call a business opportunity.
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They're just following Apple's model where Apple gets to charge a commission for a purchase through an in-app link

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Two sides to the argument — What the user pays/ What the musician gets, pretty sure there are many musicians out there who would welcome the extra .0000000000000000000000000000000000001 of cent in royalty payments.
 
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It’s getting to the point where I’m seriously thinking about cancelling my Music subscription. I listen a lot but recently I’ve started purchasing digital copies of music. They’re immediately accessible and yours for life. Modern devices have more than enough storage for my entire music collection. It’s either that or a “tax” for life to a music subscription. And it’s better for the artists too. Perhaps time we all started pushing back.
 
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Gengar said:
You can upload songs to your Apple Music library. That has forever been a feature.
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Sure, but you don’t get them recommended on Apple Music, and you’d have to get them from somewhere else first. I’m talking about uploads from other YouTube users.
 
MacRumors said:


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.

youtube-music-logo.png

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
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these guys are living in the past. They think they can get away with it because they have stolen everyone’s data and know there is expendable money there to chip away with up sells. YouTube (Google) is evil.
 
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Ja50n said:
I’m confused. They’re charging for something I can get by opening a browser and searching “[song title] lyrics”?
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No, they’re charging to force you to see them on every song. I think they’ve misunderstood the concept of listening to music if this is premium.
 
Gengar said:
You can upload songs to your Apple Music library. That has forever been a feature.
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How do I upload someone else's music? Looking for songs that are not available on any streaming service and I don't have the records but obviously some people do.
 
SBlue1 said:
How do I upload someone else's music? Looking for songs that are not available on any streaming service and I don't have the records but obviously some people do.
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You have to use the Apple Music library to add non-Apple Music files to your library.
 
Disappointing to see this. Companies are trying to gain maximum revenue from subscription/services. Anyway I am happy with Apple Music and the option to access lyrics from it.
 
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The saddest part is that due to streaming services a lot of forums which had songs you can't download and listen anywhere anymore don't exist. But nevertheless it's time to buy a hard drive and start ripping my CDs and collect digital files, which nobody can take away from me. Anyway new music is trash, so I'm just paying for the same songs every month.
 
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