latest
Apple Music now lets you annoy your friends with song lyrics
In version 3.5 you can also search by record label, if that's your Def Jam
For all that we've heard of Apple intentionally keeping Android out of its walled garden, the Apple Music streaming service seems to be a notable exception. Version 3.5 of the app is now rolling out to Android devices on the Play Store with a few interesting additions to its featureset.
Spotify is bringing full, live lyrics to music streaming in the US
Currently in testing with select users
Those who listen to music on Spotify may have wanted to look at lyrics at one point or another. For many of them, Genius's "Behind the Lyrics" experience, which only gave some lyrics alongside a big dose of trivia for some songs, hasn't cut the mustard. But after years of demand, the streaming company has relented, confirming that it is testing a full lyrics experience in the U.S.
Spotify app lets you search for songs by lyrics
The company will also publish new weekly music charts to Twitter
The Spotify apps for Android and iOS have recently picked up a new feature: The ability to search for music through song lyrics. We don't know precisely when it rolled out, but an informal announcement made by Spotify's Lin Wang implies it landed recently. Separately, Spotify has also announced that it will start publishing new music charts, including a weekly top 50, a US top 10, and a Global top 10, with other market-specific versions planned soon.
Read update
If you feel like YouTube Music (YTM) has been adding a new feature every other day, you're not mistaken. With Google Play Music going the way of the dodo soon, YTM has gone into overdrive to match it as much as possible before it's deprecation time. The latest addition is lyrics support on the web client.
Spotify has been working on proper lyrics support for ages. It likely takes this long to implement the seemingly simple feature in part due to licensing issues surrounding songtexts, which already led to a lawsuit against Google. Spotify seems to have finally found a suitable solution, as TechCrunch reports that the company is planning to roll out lyrics synced with music to 26 markets today. The US, Canada, and the UK aren't among these, though.
YouTube Music widely rolls out Explore tab and new player UI with lyrics (APK Download)
Finally getting serious about new music discovery
YouTube Music has been steadily improving and spreading to more countries since its launch. Over the past couple of months, Google has been testing and slowly rolling out two new features in the app: a new player interface with lyrics and an Explore tab for better music discovery. Both of these are now live for most users (if not everyone) in the latest app update.
Spotify finally starts showing proper, complete song lyrics synced with music (Update: New UI)
To help you realize that Queens weren't kicking cats all over the place
Read update
One of the joys of listening to music is singing along, but if you don't want to make a fool of yourself or if you really want to understand what the artist is saying (or mumbling, humming, growling), you need to have quick access to lyrics. Spotify, one of the world's largest music streaming services, was still behind on this feature until now. The service is now slowly catching up and rolling out proper lyrics support to users.
YouTube Music tests new Now Playing UI with simpler access to lyrics (Updated)
Shuffle and repeat too
Read update
More than a year after launch, Google is still bringing slow, but tangible improvements to YouTube Music. While the ability to upload your own tracks to the service isn't yet live, we now have confirmation that it's coming. A little less exciting piece of news is that the app is testing a new, improved Now Playing interface.
Songs and lyrics come hand in hand, at least if you don't listen exclusively to instrumentals and electronic music. When you're failing to understand what an artist is saying — be it because they're talking too fast, growling too much, swallowing letters left and right, or speaking a foreign language for you — lyrics help you decipher the mess and understand the song's message. Several music streaming services offer lyrics along with songs, like Spotify (though in its own Behind the lyrics flavor) and Apple Music, and now YouTube Music is getting ready to join the fold.
Read update
Google's knowledge graph is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it's great for us users and offers us information at a glance before we ever need to enter a website. On the other hand, publishers are losing a lot of impressions because people don't click through to them anymore. This is particularly evident for lyrics providers; ever since Google started to offer song texts in search, traffic has naturally dropped for them. Now, one of the biggest players, Genius, has accused the search engine of illegally lifting lyrics from their platform and has provided evidence in the form of clever apostrophe use.
For more than two years, Spotify has been offering a "Behind the Lyrics" feature that gives its users the ability to see parts of a song's lyrics accompanied by comments from other listeners, and sometimes by background information from the artists themselves. Now the company is finally working on showing subscribers what they actually want to see: plain simple automatically scrolling lyrics without any bells and whistles.
One of the major benefits of having a smart display instead of a speaker is seeing relevant controls and information on the screen. For music, that means album art, playback controls, videos if available, and most importantly, lyrics. On Google Assistant smart displays, only titles from Google Play Music showed lyrics, but that's now rolling out to Spotify as well.
When Apple announced iOS 13, one of the things that caught my attention was its live lyric implementation in the music app. That was a logical step after the company's purchase of Shazam and I liked how it was integrated in the app instead of requiring a separate layer like Musixmatch. Now, that same functionality is making its way to Apple Music on Android, along with a dark theme.
If you've splurged for a Google Home speaker or Smart Display over the Black Friday/Cyber Monday madness, you'll be glad to know they're getting new features soon, some of which are coming just in time for the holidays.
Musixmatch, the popular app for overlaying lyrics during music playback in other applications, just got a new beta release. The V7 beta introduces a whole new look for both the app and its resulting overlay. If you're fond of firing up Spotify or Play Music and reading along with the lyrics, now you can do it with a slightly fresher look.
Genius, which started out as Rap Genius, is a cool Android app for music lovers who want to not just discover the lyrics to their favorite songs, but also the stories and trivia behind them. With version 2.0, the app is getting a couple of nifty new features, none more important than the slick animation on the redesigned song page.
The main reasons I can speak and write in English so well (or at least I think I do), despite it being my third language, are song lyrics and movie subtitles. Teenage-me used to spend hours listening to American music and watching American movies, trying to understand what was being said, then resorting to hit the subtitle button on my VCD player (I'm old) or to go to LetsSingIt to find the lyrics. They helped me get pronunciation right like no book or college course ever could.
I'm running out of creative ways to write these articles, but I'm going to try and give this one my bestest. Google is giving away another album for free on Google Play Music; this time it's Jason Mraz's third album, 'We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things.'
Google Now on Tap, the search engine's contextual tool for Android, hides some pretty neat tricks up its sleeve. But perhaps none is so handy to music lovers as this option, spotted by an Android Police reader: Now on Tap can serve up song lyrics directly from music apps with just a few on-screen taps. Google's Knowledge Graph system can already find lyrics fairly easily, but the way it's been integrated into the retrieval system for Android is fairly slick.
Musixmatch was known for the longest time as a lyrics application that found the words to a song you're listening to and displayed them in rhythm with the music. But Musixmatch has grown beyond that and over the past couple of years has become one of the most interesting music players on Android with local music playback, Chromecast support, and a nice Material Design interface. It is moving one step further now with the addition of Spotify.