Apple Music has offered lyrics since iOS 10, updating to synced lyrics on iOS last year and on Mac earlier this year. Spotify is now doing the same, but unfortunately most of us won’t have access to the feature …
TechCrunch reports that the function is initially limited to Southeast Asia, India and Latin America. An earlier test of limited scale follows.
Last November, Spotify confirmed that it was testing real-time lyrics synchronized with music in select markets. Tomorrow, the company will announce the launch of its new lyrics feature in 26 world markets in Southeast Asia, India and Latin America. This will be the first time that lyrics have been offered in 22 of these 26 markets, as only Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Mexico had some form of letter support in the past through other providers. […]
The feature will provide real-time lyrics in the language the songs are sung […] The following markets will have access to the new function starting tomorrow: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, El Salvador, Uruguay, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan , Singapore and Hong Kong.
It should be released live within an hour.
How TechCrunch’s Sarah Pérez explains that the reason it is not more widely available is due to licensing challenges. Genius is the main provider of lyrics and sometimes has exclusive agreements with publishers. Other companies have been frustrated by this, and have sometimes resorted to stealing intellectual property.
Last year, for example, Genius sued Google and its lyrics partner, LyricFind for $ 50 million, alleging that he caught LyricFind red-handed stealing his lyrics. Genius had used an ingenious digital watermarking technique in which he had set the 2nd, 5th, 13th, 14th, 16th, and 20th apostrophes of each watermarked song as curly apostrophes, and all other apostrophes in a straight line. Interpreted as Morse code, the pattern spelled the word “redhanded”.
Apple has a lyrics deal with Genius, and it acquired more with the purchase of Shazam, which gave it time-synchronized lyrics. But last year I argued that the company needs to improve its game here.
It always seems completely random whether iTunes or Apple Music has song lyrics or not. If it boiled down to the popularity of the artist or song, it would be understandable, but that’s not the case. Often it won’t offer anything for some pretty well-known artists and tracks, and yet it will have them for a really dark album.
Some albums do not have lyrics, others have lyrics for all tracks, while others have lyrics for some, but not for all songs. […]
Lyrics are especially important in the songwriter genre. Artists who fall into this category often write the words first, because they have something to say, and then put them to the music.
So if Apple doesn’t do anything else, it could do this: Prioritize the singer-songwriter’s genre by ordering its lyrics database. Start there and then build out.
More than half of readers said they care about lyrics a lot.
Image: @htshit
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