Not Really, But Kind Of…
Last week Spotify added a new feature to all accounts to be able to show lyrics to the song you’re playing right on the app, whichever one you use. The functionality is a partnership with Musixmatch.
This was welcome news to many Spotify users who sometimes want to find out lyrics to their favorite songs or singalong and didn’t have a very convenient way to see lyrics directly from the app they were playing from. However, there was immediate chaos online on social platforms and reddit forums about not being able to see the lyrics feature, or lyrics not being right, or not being synced to songs.
From what I’ve gathered so far, there’s going to be a lot of songs on Spotify that don’t have Musixmatch pages with lyrics, so if Musixmatch doesn’t have lyrics, Spotify won’t either. So if you’re a crazy indie-loving rat-bastard like yours truly, half your rotation probably won’t have this feature available.
But there are still a ton of indie songs, and really the majority of songs most people are listening to regularly are going to have lyrics. Some songs don’t have the lyrics synced, meaning they don’t move down the screen like a karaoke, it’s just static words that you can read, but doesn’t move along with the song. Also complicating matters, is some users appear to have gotten this feature earlier than some others. When in doubt, make sure your app is updated, and test out on some really popular songs just to make sure the feature is there. Hopefully any early bugs will be worked out.
One final thing to keep in mind is a lot of the lyrics are just going to be straight up wrong, so I feel like this is going to create a huge online movement to audit and update the Musixmatch database so us perfectionist music fans can have everything as right as we need this world to be.
Kind of cool feature though. Try it out when listening to our latest playlist, “Not Whack Midwest Emo” under our SnowSound Music profile.