Spotify is conducting a test where it is locking its in-app lyrics feature away from some free tier users. First spotted by Pop Base and later confirmed by The Verge, it is reported that those not subscribed to the platform’s Premium service have recently encountered a prompt urging them to sign up if they wish to view a song’s lyrics.
When approached by The Verge, Spotify confirmed that it is indeed conducting the test, but to a select number of non-Premium users in the US. “At Spotify, we routinely conduct a number of tests, some of those tests end up paving the way for our broader user experience and others serve only as an important learning,” a spokesperson said in a reply to the publication.
Spotify has reportedly started requiring a premium subscription to view lyrics. pic.twitter.com/1F6GrWofST
— Pop Base (@PopBase) September 4, 2023
The music streaming platform’s real-time lyrics feature was initially introduced back in late 2019, with certain countries including our own only receiving it the year after. Its addition is basically Spotify’s answer to Apple Music’s own feature which has been around since 2018 – even much earlier than that if you count the company’s prior efforts before collaborating with Genius. But unlike its competitor, the latter does not offer its music streaming service for free.
With that said, it’s not hard to see why Spotify is mulling on the idea of locking the lyrics feature behind a paywall. In fact, this isn’t the first time that the platform has stripped certain functions away from non-paying users in order to encourage them to sign up for its Premium subscription. Among those removed include the ability to select songs, disable Shuffle and manually scrubbing to certain parts of a song, just to name a few.
It’s actually baffling to why Spotify needed a test for this in the first place. If user feedback is what they’re after, then the general consensus – especially when it comes to removing specific privileges, regardless of platform – should’ve been obvious from the start. Spoiler alert: it’s never positive.
