Spotify steals Apple Music’s time-synced song lyrics

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Spotify Premium update October 2018
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Photo: Spotify

You can now sing along to your favorite tracks on Spotify without messing up the words. The world’s biggest streaming service has finally caught up with Apple Music by adding time-synced song lyrics, courtesy of Musixmatch.

Time-synced lyrics was one of the biggest improvements Apple made to Apple Music in its massive iOS 13 update last fall. It gives you the ability to follow lyrics in real-time as your songs play, and it works wonderfully.

The feature gave Apple Music an advantage over rivals, particularly Spotify (Amazon Music had it first, of course) — but that advantage was short-lived. Spotify is now rolling out exactly the same feature to its more than 271 million users.

Spotify finally gets real lyrics

Spotify has been testing the feature with a small number of users since last November. It has now begun expanding its reach with the latest version of its apps, and users all over social media are reporting it is live for them.

https://twitter.com/sushidaging/status/1230053124968026112

Lyrics appear beneath the play controls on the Now Playing screen, and they scroll automatically as your track plays. They replace what used to be the “Behind the Lyrics” section, where Spotify previously offered little tidbits of information about each track (when available).

You’ll notice that lyrics aren’t available for every single song — like on Apple Music. If you’re listening to some obscure track from the ’60s, you’re probably not going to see them. But they appear to be available for the biggest artists, and it seems most languages are supported.

It’s not clear how long it will take for Spotify to make lyrics available to every user. The rollout seems to be happening quickly, however, so if you don’t already see them inside your Spotify app, they should be available any day now.

Via: Android Police

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