What you need to know
- Live lyrics have begun appearing more widely on YouTube Music.
- The feature has been spotted previously, but was not widely available until now.
- Not every song seems to have access to the updated lyrics, although this could change.
After a long wait and a couple of false starts, live lyrics appear to be rolling out more widely on YouTube Music. The feature was spotted by 9to5Google and appears to be rolling out on Android and iOS.
If you open YouTube Music and tap the lyrics tab at the bottom of a song, you’ll be met with a much larger font and lyrics that highlight and scroll as the song progresses. They will also have a semi-transparent background based on the album cover of the track you’re playing.
While the lyrics will automatically scroll while the song plays, you can also scroll ahead yourself to a particular part of a song. Clicking on a lyric will bring the song to that part and continue playing thereafter.
So far, I’ve noticed that not every song seems to have access to the updated real-time lyrics, retaining the smaller static lyrics. This will even be the case with songs from the same artist, and it’s not clear why this is the case. The feature may be still rolling out, as there hasn’t been any sort of announcement or highlight from Google about the updated lyrics.
Live lyrics are something that YouTube Music lovers such as myself have wanted for quite some time. Spotify rolled out with real-time live lyrics in 2021, and YouTube Music was spotted testing the feature late last year. Then, earlier this year, some users noticed the updated real-time lyrics in YouTube Music, although it appeared slightly different, seemingly without the semi-transparent background. It was also not widely available at the time, leaving many wondering when the feature would roll out.
In addition to real-time lyrics, YouTube Music recently rolled out a new Samples tab, which presents users with a YouTube Shorts-like interface for sampling music they may like. Users can like a song, add it to a playlist, send it, and even use the song in a Shorts video.