With a free Spotify account, you can’t get the best sound quality, order songs, or download music to play offline. Another tool has been taken away from us: the ability to view song lyrics.
For those who use a Spotify free account, a new message has started showing that they can only see a song’s lyrics a limited number of times per month. The lyrics of songs cannot be viewed if you continuously use a Spotify-free account.
Spotify tried a similar change as early as September 2023. It looks like it is now being made for more people. TechCrunch asked the company to explain the change, but they only said that Spotify’s features can change over time based on location and device. For now, it only affects a small group of Spotify users, as the company is probably about to make the change to all free accounts.
It seems a bit strange to hide song lyrics behind a paywall, considering other streaming services, even YouTube Music, offer them for free. You can also generally find the text on other websites or apps, such as Genius or Shazam. For some songs, like a karaoke video, Spotify does sync the words to the music, but not all songs can do that.
Spotify seems to think that letting people see lyrics will make them sign up for Spotify Premium, but it’s not clear if that will work. In its Q1 2024 earnings report, the company said that Spotify has 239 million paid customers and 615 million monthly active users (MAUs). That is, not quite half of Spotify’s users have Spotify Premium. In 2023, the price of Spotify Premium went up in the US and other countries as well. Spotify is going to raise the price again soon.
In December, Spotify laid off 17% of its staff. This came after two other rounds of layoffs earlier that year, also to make more money. Then, in the first quarter of 2024, the company made a lot of money. During the Q1 earnings call, Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, said that the layoffs “did disrupt our day-to-day operations more than we anticipated.”