Lyrics (Day 632)

Spotify has the lyrics feature, finally!

I did a quick search, looks like it was launched back in November. I just found out today!

The lyrics feature has been available in Chinese music apps for as long as I can remember. And the lyrics are synced to each word like a Karaoke machine. I had wondered why wasn't it available in the US market. Is it because of copyright? Costs more?

There are simple text formats to define the start time of a particular word or sentence for any song. And some players will sync the lyrics with the video or soundtrack. The standard is simple enough for anybody to contribute to the lyrics, like captions. But the lyrics were rarely available outside of China.

Wonder what has changed, but it's good progress to get Spotify's lyrics feature finally. The few songs I checked don't have word-to-word sync. Instead, it's a paragraph-to-paragraph sync. And there are still many songs that do not have lyrics available. Hope to see more iterations of improvements soon.