Spotify Wants You to Pay for Song Lyrics

Spotify now mandates to Spotify to pay for song lyrics, a subscription to Spotify Premium in order to access song lyrics beyond a specific threshold.

Free Spotify accounts can’t play songs in any order, download music for offline play, or get the highest audio quality. There’s now another feature being removed: the ability to view song lyrics.

A new warning has started appearing for some free Spotify users, explaining that there is a monthly limit on how many times you can view lyrics for a given song. After you reach that limit, you can’t view the lyrics for more songs unless you sign up for Spotify Premium.

Spotify was testing a similar change as early as September 2023, but now it seems to be rolling out more widely. The company declined to explain the change to TechCrunch, only saying that Spotify’s features can vary over time depending on the region and device. Presumably, Spotify is preparing to roll the change out to all free accounts, but for now it’s still only affecting a subset of users.

*Spotify Wants You to Pay for Song Lyrics*

Streaming service Spotify announced today that the service now has more than 600 million monthly active users. The company said in its Q4 2023 earnings report that it added 28 million users in the quarter, which marks the second biggest quarterly gain in the company’s history.

The Sweden-based company noted that apart from having 602 million users now, the service has over 236 million paid users — a year-on-year growth of 15%. Last year, Spotify raised the prices of its premium subscription tier in the U.S. for the first time from $9.99 per month to $10.99 per month.

The company said that the subscriber growth was led by the Rest of the World and Latin America, which represents 35% of total paid users.

ALSO READ: How to transfer entire playlists between Spotify, Apple Music, YT Music, & others

Additionally, Spotify said that its year-end Spotify Wrapped campaign, which gives insights to users about what they consumed on the platform, drew more than 225 million users.

In November, the company announced that premium users in the U.S. will have 15 hours of listening time per month across 200,000 titles. It also partnered with TikTok to let users save a song in a clip directly to the Spotify app.

The company earned €3.7 billion ($3.97 billion) in revenues with a year-on-year growth of 16%. It registered an operating loss of €75 million, which is better than the loss of €231 million last year for the same period. However, Spotify made €32 million in profits in Q3 2023. The company’s ad revenues have jumped to an all-time high of €501 million with 12% year-on-year growth.

It’s a bit bizarre to lock song lyrics behind a paywall, considering most other audio platforms with free tiers offer lyrics, including YouTube Music. The text is also usually available on third-party websites like Genius or apps like Shazam. Spotify does synchronize the lyrics to the music for some tracks, like a karaoke video, but that feature is not available on all songs.

Spotify seems to be hoping access to lyrics could push more people to Spotify Premium, but it’s not clear if that will work out. The company’s Q1 2024 earnings report revealed Spotify now has 615 million monthly active users (MAUs), but only 239 million paid subscribers. In other words, less than half of Spotify’s userbase has Spotify Premium. The price for Spotify Premium also went up in the United States and other countries in 2023, and Spotify is planning another price increase.

Spotify laid off 17% of its staff in December, after two more rounds of layoffs earlier that year, also in an effort to boost profits. The company then reported record profits in Q1 2024, and in the Q1 earnings call, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said the job cuts “did disrupt our day-to-day operations more than we anticipated.”

However, at that time, a Spotify spokesperson clarified that the changes were “only a test” that was taking place with a limited number of users in a “pair of markets.” Spotify is no longer referring to the changes as a test, though it’s unclear why it wouldn’t document access to lyrics as being a premium feature somewhere on its website — like on the page where users can upgrade plans or within its help documentation. That could be because the company is still testing the monthly limit on lyrics for free accounts; free users report seeing messages that tell them that every time they tap “Show lyrics,” it counts toward the new limit. This shows that Spotify wants you to pay for song Lyrics.

Spotify didn’t offer any more detail about why it’s now paywalling lyrics, but clearly it’s a bid to push more people to its paid tier. In its most recent quarter, the company reached more than 600 million monthly active users, ahead of estimates, and paid subscribers were up to 236 million+, representing 15% year-over-year growth. However, quarterly revenue had missed analyst expectations of 3.72 billion euros, coming in at 3.67 billion ($3.94 billion) instead.

Whether blocking lyrics will push more people to subscribe remains to be seen. Lyrics are easily available and free via the web and in other apps that work alongside Spotify, like Genius, Apple’s Shazam or Musixmatch, for example.

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