Spotify tests making lyrics a Premium feature

Spotify is experimenting with the choices of its Premium service. Over the previous few days, a number of Spotify customers on the free tier seen they not had entry to in-app lyrics. As a substitute, they have been greeted by a notification bubble saying, “Take pleasure in lyrics on Spotify Premium,” together with a hyperlink to enroll. Spotify says placing the in-app lyrics behind a paywall is simply part of its routine testing.

“At Spotify, we routinely conduct numerous checks, a few of these checks find yourself paving the way in which for our broader person expertise and others serve solely as an necessary studying,”

Spotify’s co-head of world communications, CJ Stanley, informed The Verge. “We don’t have any additional information to share right now.” It is attainable Spotify might take away the paywall and make in-app lyrics obtainable to all customers once more, however there’s at the moment no timeline for that.

This take a look at comes at a time when Spotify has laid off employees from its podcast division, which the corporate poured quite a bit of money into lately. And regardless of elevating its costs and actively working to develop its paid subscribers, it is nonetheless losing significant amounts of money. Spotify’s choice to experiment with the potential for making lyrics a Premium function exhibits that the corporate is trying to find methods to get customers to pay for a subscription. Nonetheless, this may not be one of the simplest ways to take action as some customers who’ve seen the change are usually not glad about it.

In-app lyrics was considered one of Spotify’s most requested options and the corporate started testing in 2019. In 2021, Spotify officially rolled out the function, which allowed customers to see and sing alongside to the phrases of their favourite tracks. This was obtainable to all customers — on each free and Premium variations and on all platforms. Whereas charging for a beforehand free function will all the time result in some damaging suggestions as folks regulate, some customers imagine this transfer can be discriminatory to folks with disabilities.