YouTube Music is finally catching up to Spotify with real-time lyrics

YouTube Music has a strong library thanks to getting all remixes and cover versions from YouTube uploads, but in many other areas it lags behind competitors like Apple Music and Spotify. Sure, Google is working to bring features on par with the music streaming giants by adding things like song credits and automatic offline downloads, but it’s missing basic things like real-time lyrics. If so, it’s hard to imagine the service catching up. Thankfully, it looks like the tide is finally turning.

Multiple Reddit users spotted a redesigned lyrics screen in the YouTube Music app for Android and iOS today (via 9to5Google). Just like Spotify, lyrics are now synced with songs in real time, so relevant excerpts are highlighted as the lyrics are sung. This makes understanding the singer much easier.

In the past, YouTube Music lyrics were little more than scrollable walls of text. You can manually scroll through the new styles, but leave them alone and they will automatically resync with the song. The font size has also been increased, making it even easier to read along with the song.Users who have this feature will find it available on most, if not all, of the songs they’ve tried, and no matter what track they’re listening to.[歌詞]It says you can access it by just tapping a tab.

YouTube Music has been working on adding this feature for several months now. In October, Google announced a partnership with leading real-time lyrics provider Musixmatch to “build more lyrics features in the future.” YouTube Music then confirmed an early implementation of the feature when he began testing real-time lyrics in his Cast player in December.

New real-time lyrics are deployed with server-side updates, so it’s an account-based change that happens independent of app version. It appears to be in the early stages of rollout, and as far as we know, it could be a few weeks before the new lyrics menu becomes available to the majority of users. It’s version agnostic, you can try your luck by using the latest version from APKMirror or updating the YouTube Music app in Play Store.