My subscription fatigue is real, but at the end of the day, I do recognize that companies need to make money. If one of them manages to put together a compelling package of features for a reasonable price, I can decide whether or not I find that value worth the money. That’s fine. What isn’t fine is offering a feature for free for years, and then suddenly deciding to lock it behind a paywall.
It seems YouTube didn’t get that memo. Starting on Saturday, outlets like 9to5Google began reporting that YouTube Music had started to remove the ability to vie lyrics for free users. If you want a full lyrics experience, you’ll need to subscribe to either YouTube Music Premium, or YouTube Premium (the latter includes Music Premium). The service hasn’t cut these users off cold turkey. According to anecdotal user experiences, YouTube Music is opening lyrics access to free users for five songs per month. Once they play song number six, they’ll only have access to the first two lines of each song, as the rest of the lyrics will be blurred out. These users will have to wait until the following month to view another five songs.
There appears to be no confusion about why the lyrics are blurred out, either. When you switch to the “Lyrics” tab on YouTube Music as a free account, a new banner appears, telling you how many views you have remaining. Beneath this, you’ll see the option to “Unlock lyrics with Premium,” a clear message that, unless you pay up, you only get a limited number of lyrics views. This, apparently, follows a months-long period where YouTube Music tested lyrics as a Premium-only feature.
For what it’s worth, when I tried to see what the current lyrics situation looks like on my free YouTube Music app, the service gave me two weeks of Premium for free, with no option to skip it. That’s, um, nice of YouTube, but since I already have an Apple Music subscription, the only real consequence here is that I can’t test these new lyrics limitations out.
Free music services that offer lyrics
I don’t see the strategy here. Lyrics aren’t something I feel people would feel compelled to pay for specifically—but they might be annoyed enough at losing them to look elsewhere. Spotify, for example, offers a full lyrics experience for free users. It was only last week the company added offline lyric downloads for Premium users only, but, even then, that’s adding a feature for the subscription tier—not taking away an existing feature from free users.
What do you think so far?
It’s not just Spotify, either. Other free music streaming services offers lyrics, as well, including Pandora, Amazon Music Free, and Freefy. These are largely radio services, so you may not have as much flexibility as you would have with YouTube Music free—but, hey, you at least have lyrics.
Losing lyrics isn’t the end of the world for free YouTube Music users, either. Just about any song’s lyrics can be found on the internet. Sometimes, the lyrics show up in a Google search window without you needing to even click a link. Otherwise, sites like Genius and AZLyrics do exist. It’s just a bummer YouTube feels the need to gatekeep the in-app experience.
