YouTube Music Now Hides Song Lyrics Behind A Premium Paywall

YouTube Music has ended the era of unrestricted free sing-alongs by moving song lyrics behind a Premium paywall, forcing non-paying listeners to decide if words is worth a monthly fee. Shame, shame, Google.

The money grab change, which is beginning a worldwide roll-out this month, heralds the end of a recent Google experiment to monetize one of the platform's most utilized secondary features. For years, the Lyrics tab was a standard utility for all users, but now the service imposes a strict limit on free accounts: a pathetic five song views per month. Once this threshold is crossed, the app provides the first couple of lines of a song as a teaser, while the rest of the text is blurred out. 


We have no doubts that this will be controversial, but is another effort on Google's part to bolster its subscription revenue, which exceeded $60 billion in 2025. Unlike technical features like high-bitrate audio or offline downloads, lyrics are a fundamental part of the modern streaming experience, particularly for those who use the app for karaoke and/or social sharing. Proponents of this change suggest that the paywall may be a way for Google to offset the licensing costs for third-party providers like Musixmatch and LyricFind, but still.

YouTube Music has thus placed itself in a unique and somewhat isolated position within the streaming wars. Spotify attempted a similar lyrics paywall in 2024; it eventually redacted on that decision this year following intense user backlash, choosing instead to keep lyrics free (although offline lyrics now require a Premium account). Currently, Apple Music and Amazon Music continue to offer synchronized lyrics as a core part of their services.

For the millions of users on YouTube Music’s free tier, the reason to stay has just gotten a lot weaker. They can either pay for the privilege of reading along, migrate to competitors who still offer the feature for free, or go old-school style and display lyrics manually (which can, ironically, be easily and quickly found by Googling it).