YouTube Music has joined Spotify and Apple Music as the next major music streaming platform to display song lyrics in real time. The feature started rolling out to the Android app earlier this month, and the company has now officially confirmed that it is now also available on iOS. It is, however, yet to be rolled out on the web-player, and there’s no official word on when that might happen.
To see the lyrics, users will have to start playing a song and then tap on the info icon (i) to the left of the song’s name. Do note, however, that the feature seems to be available only for a handful of songs for now, and it’s also not entirely clear if it’s available globally. In a correspondence to The Verge, the company said that the lyrics are sourced from LyricFind and, are updated on a daily basis, but there’s no official word on how long it would take for the company to roll it out to all songs on the platform.
YouTube Music is following in the footsteps of Spotify and Apple Music with the introduction of the new feature, although, the lyrics on both those platforms are synced to the actual music, meaning, the exact words are highlighted in real time as the song moves forward.
On YouTube Music, however, the lyrics appear as a wall of text without any real-time sync, so it will be interesting to see how long it will take for the company to introduce that going forward. While the built-in lyrics feature is certainly an important addition to the app, one would hope that the company will add lyrics support for more songs sooner rather rather than later.
