If you use Spotify for free, you know it comes with some limitations. You can’t play songs in any order, download music to listen offline or enjoy the best sound quality. Now, there’s one more restriction: you can’t see song lyrics anymore.
Spotify Wants You to Pay for Song Lyrics
Some free Spotify users are noticing a new message. It says there’s a limit on how many times you can see lyrics for a song each month. Once you hit that limit, you can’t see lyrics for more songs unless you pay for Spotify Premium.
This change isn’t entirely new. Spotify tested it back in September 2023, and now it’s rolling out to more users. Spotify hasn’t given a clear reason for this, but they say their features might change depending on where you are and what device you’re using. Right now, only some free users are affected, but it might expand to everyone eventually.
It’s a bit odd to hide lyrics behind a paywall when other free music apps, like YouTube Music, offer them for free. You can also find lyrics on websites like Genius or apps like Shazam. While Spotify does show lyrics for some songs, it’s not available for all of them.
Spotify hopes that by making lyrics a Premium feature, more people will sign up for it. But it’s hard to say if that will actually happen. In the first three months of 2024, Spotify had 615 million monthly users, but only 239 million of them paid for Premium. That means less than half of Spotify’s users are Premium members. Plus, Spotify raised its prices in 2023 and plans to do it again.
To make more money, Spotify also cut jobs in 2023. But despite this, they made record profits in early 2024.
During a meeting about their earnings, Spotify’s CEO said the job cuts caused more problems than they expected.
