Tech Team / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Spotify started testing paywalled lyrics with a limited number of accounts back in September, pushing free users to upgrade to Premium.
- This change appears to be rolling out widely now, as many free users have complained about the matter for the past few days.
- YouTube Music has arguably become a better music streaming platform for users seeking free access with fewer limitations.
Last September, Spotify restricted some free users from accessing its lyrics feature as part of an A/B experiment. After months of testing, it now appears that the company is rolling out this new restriction widely. Those wanting to view song lyrics while listening must now pay for Spotify Premium.
In the past few days, multiple Redditors (1, 2, 3, 4) have voiced their frustration regarding Spotify’s latest limitation. What was a free feature for years now requires users to pay a monthly fee.
While locking the lyrics feature behind a paywall makes sense from a business standpoint, the free tier’s constraints are slowly making the service irritably unusable in an effort to push more users to subscribe to Spotify Premium.
For those unfamiliar, Spotify already limits free users to six track skips per hour and forces shuffled playback. As a result, the free tier acts like a radio of sorts that users have little control over. Meanwhile, YouTube Music’s free tier allows unlimited skips, includes lyrics, has skippable ads, and doesn’t force users to shuffle the queue.
Will you now subscribe to Spotify Premium?
12 votes
So, at this point, YouTube Music has arguably become a better option for users looking to stream music for free. Perhaps the only noticeable drawback, when compared to Spotify, is that free background playback is limited to the web player. Otherwise, users get to play (and sing along) whatever content they desire in any order — including unofficial covers that are exclusively uploaded to YouTube.
