September 22, 2023

Spotify has began testing proscribing tune lyrics to Premium subscribers. As noticed on Reddit, some Spotify Free customers just lately began seeing pop-ups asking them to subscribe to Premium after they tried to see tune lyrics within the cellular app, and Spotify has since confirmed the experiment.

“At Spotify, we routinely conduct a lot of assessments, a few of these assessments find yourself paving the way in which for our broader consumer expertise and others serve solely as an essential studying. We don’t have any additional information to share presently,” stated CJ Stanley, Spotify’s co-head of worldwide communications in a press release shared with The Verge.

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Spotify takes its lyrics from a service named Musixmatch, and that in all probability comes at a price. Whereas that is simply an experiment, placing such a primary function like tune lyrics behind a paywall appears fairly a dangerous wager: It’s in all probability extra prone to push customers to search for one other music streaming service than to persuade them to subscribe to Spotify Premium.

In its newest quarterly earnings, Spotify reported 10 million new paid subscribers, which was a quarterly document. The corporate now has 220 million Premium subscribers for a complete of 551 million month-to-month energetic customers, a quantity that was up 27%. Nonetheless, the corporate remains to be dropping cash and it just lately raised the worth of Spotify Premium within the US and different markets.

Whereas Spotify Premium remains to be good worth at $10.99, different providers equivalent to Apple Music or Amazon Music supply higher audio high quality on the identical worth. Nonetheless, Spotify is looking for different methods to make its Premium subscription extra useful. Not too long ago, the corporate launched a brand new AI DJ within the US, Canada, the UK, and Eire to maintain Premium customers hooked to Spotify all through the day.