Spotify Tests Making Song Lyrics a Premium Feature

Spotify has started testing restricting song lyrics to Premium subscribers. As spotted on Reddit, some Spotify Free users recently started seeing pop-ups asking them to subscribe to Premium when they tried to see song lyrics in the mobile app, and Spotify has since confirmed the experiment.

“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. We don’t have any further news to share at this time,” said CJ Stanley, Spotify’s co-head of global communications in a statement shared with The Verge.

Spotify takes its lyrics from a service named Musixmatch, and that probably comes at a cost. While this is just an experiment, putting such a basic feature like song lyrics behind a paywall seems quite a risky bet: It’s probably more likely to push users to look for another music streaming service than to convince them to subscribe to Spotify Premium.

In its latest quarterly earnings, Spotify reported 10 million new paid subscribers, which was a quarterly record. The company now has 220 million Premium subscribers for a total of 551 million monthly active users, a number that was up 27%. However, the company is still losing money and it recently raised the price of Spotify Premium in the US and other markets.

While Spotify Premium is still good value at $10.99, other services such as Apple Music or Amazon Music offer better audio quality at the same price. However, Spotify is trying to find other ways to make its Premium subscription more valuable. Recently, the company introduced a new AI DJ in the US, Canada, the UK, and Ireland to keep Premium users hooked to Spotify throughout the day.