Spotifyintroduced live lyrics a long time ago. It’s a feature that automatically scrolls lyrics for you as a song progresses, making it easy to either understand everything or to sing along. Google’s competing service,YouTube Music, has long worked on rivaling this handy option, and after months of testing, live lyrics are now finally rolling out more widely on Google’s music streaming service.
Live lyrics can be accessed by starting a song with lyrics attached to them and heading to theLyricstab in theNow Playingscreen. If live lyrics haven’t rolled out to you before, you will notice that the text in this tab is now much bigger, with a blurred background showing the album cover of the song that’s playing behind it. The line that’s currently sung is highlighted with a whiter color, with the text smoothly snapping onwards from line to line.
While live lyrics work great for many songs and in many situations, it doesn’t look like they’re perfect just yet. The biggest caveat right now is that they’re only available on Android and iOS, and only when you listen locally on the device in question. The lyrics don’t scroll along automatically when you cast for us just yet. We’ve also noticed that the auto scrolling behavior is sometimes buggy, with the highlighted line and the scrolling behavior inconsistent and out of sync. Starting the song in question again seems to do the trick, though.
Old vs. new
Meanwhile, live lyrics are available on Spotify virtually everywhere you can listen to it. In 2022, Spotify brought live lyrics to the Nest Hub and other smart displays. You can also follow along live lyrics on your computer and your TV on Spotify. With YouTube Music now offering basic support for the feature, we can only hope that we will soon see a similar broad availability for the feature on Google’s platform.
According to9to5Google, the wide rollout begins with YouTube Music version 6.15 on Android and 6.16 on iOS. If live lyrics aren’t showing up for you just yet, try force closing the app by swiping it away from the Recents screen. Since live lyrics don’t seem to be available for all songs, you might also want to try with a few titles to see if you really don’t have the feature.
After initial worries when Google turned off the lights for Play Music and switched to YouTube Music, the platform is in a good position now. Google only recently added podcast support to the app, with a wider rollout of more podcasts hopefully coming soon. The company also keeps tweaking discoverability and social features on the platform, with Google testing comments on the Now Playing screen and adding fun features like seasonal music reviews.
Thanks: Hamzah and Moshe
