Spotify tests making lyrics a Premium feature | Engadget

Spotify is experimenting with the choices of its Premium service. Over the previous few days, a number of Spotify customers on the free tier observed they now not had entry to in-app lyrics. As an alternative, 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 a a part of its routine testing.

“At Spotify, we routinely conduct a variety of tests, a few of these tests find yourself paving the best way for our broader consumer expertise and others serve solely as an essential studying,”
Spotify’s co-head of world communications, CJ Stanley, informed The Verge. “We don’t have any additional information to share at the moment.” It is attainable Spotify might take away the paywall and make in-app lyrics accessible to all customers once more, however there may be presently no timeline for that.

This check comes at a time when Spotify has laid off staff from its podcast division, which the corporate poured fairly a bit of cash into in recent times. And regardless of elevating its costs and actively working to develop its paid subscribers, it is nonetheless dropping important quantities of cash. Spotify’s determination to experiment with the opportunity of making lyrics a Premium feature reveals that the corporate is looking for methods to get customers to pay for a subscription. Nonetheless, this won’t be the easiest way to take action as some customers who’ve observed the change usually are not joyful about it.

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