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Spotify is making a popular feature available to its customers for a fee. They are indignant and vent their anger.
Munich – Be it streaming services for music or those for series and films: Many providers have now prohibited their customers from sharing accounts between multiple people. And providers are constantly changing their offerings and making functions that customers previously had to pay for available free of charge – or vice versa.
With the music streaming service Spotify, customers now have to be prepared for the fact that a popular feature is no longer available in the free membership. Spotify is now incorporating song lyrics into Spotify Premium, reports the US tech news portal TechCrunch. This means that song lyrics can only be viewed by customers who pay for the premium membership.
Spotify’s feature has been popular with customers of the streaming service
Song lyrics have been playing a role on Spotify since 2020. Since then, you can use the streaming service’s search function to search not only for songs, artists or albums, but also for song lyrics. Possibly the aim was to catch up with other music providers such as Apple Music or Deezer. At the end of 2021, Spotify also introduced the display of song lyrics.
Initially this was only available as a test in some Asian markets. Because the function was extremely well received by Spotify users there, Spotify quickly released it for all users worldwide. Spotify works with the app Musixmatch to display the song lyrics.
Spotify customers express their outrage at the innovation: “It’s really annoying”
According to various reports referring to angry posts from users on the social news aggregator Reddit Spotify has made the change TechCrunch confirmed – but without giving reasons for the decision. Instead, the company simply said that Spotify features may change over time between different markets and across different devices.
On Reddit, for example, a user complained about the streaming service’s decision because he was dependent on the visual presentation of the song lyrics: “Why did Spotify put the lyrics behind a premium payment? This is really annoying because I’m mostly deaf and I rely on the lyrics to understand the songs, but I can’t get a job because of the deafness so I can’t pay for premium.”
Spotify missed quarterly sales – is that a reason for the new offering?
While Spotify hasn’t yet provided any further details on why it moved lyrics behind the paywall, it’s clear that the streaming service is trying to get more people to pay for a subscription. Spotify recently began offering full HD music videos to users with a premium membership.
In the last quarter, the Swedish streaming service recorded loud TechCrunch more than 600 million monthly active users worldwide – and is therefore above the previously forecast values. The number of users with a premium subscription rose to over 236 million, representing growth of 15 percent compared to the previous year.
Nevertheless, quarterly sales missed analysts’ expectations of 3.72 billion euros and instead amounted to 3.67 billion (the equivalent of $3.94 billion). Recently had Spotify increases prices for its customers in the USA. It is still unclear whether this will also apply to users in Germany.
The change to Spotify has been tested beforehand – does this put the streaming service at a disadvantage?
The change at Spotify was announced in the fall of last year. At this point, users without premium membership received text messages stating that a premium subscription was necessary in order to continue displaying song lyrics. Spotify stated at the time that this was a test that would only be carried out in select markets.
It now remains to be seen whether the measure will encourage more users to take up a premium subscription. Hundreds of thousands of song lyrics can be viewed on websites like Genius.com or Songtexte.com, and apps like Genius, Shazam or Musixmatch also make them easily accessible and available free of charge. (fh)
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