Newsletter
In YouTube Music, you’re able to view a song’s lyrics while you’re listening to it. That’s a useful feature to have, but the company has been working on making it more fun for a few months. After a while of waiting, YouTube Music is finally rolling out live lyrics.
We’ve known that YouTube has been working on this feature for some time. We first heard about it in April, and we’ve been wondering when the company was going to launch it. However, 9To5Google has spotted this feature in the wild, and that shows that YouTube is in the process of releasing it to the public.
YouTube Music is rolling out live lyrics
Live lyrics are a nice way for you to know where you are in the song when you’re viewing the lyrics. You never know when you’ll lose your place.
This new feature brings a new look to the lyrics UI. Instead of seeing a solid background color, you’ll see through the panel to the album art, only it will be heavily blurred. The words will float over the background.
The text will light up as the song progresses, letting you know where you are in the song. The rest of the text will remain grayed out. While the lyrics are timed to the music, you’ll still be able to scroll further in the lyrics to see what words are coming up. However, when the song reaches the next line, it will scroll back to the current line.
One little detail is that you’ll see a little musical note in between some of the lines. This indicates sections when there’s just music with no lyrics. A neat feature is that, if you tap on a line in the lyrics, the app will navigate to that point in the song.
It’s still a work in progress
We were able to see this feature, but it’s not there 100%. There are still songs on the platform that don’t have lyrics available, so that will remain a problem.
One thing we noticed was that the live lyrics aren’t available for all songs. You’re likely to still see songs with the older style of lyrics. We’ve seen a case where one song will have the live lyrics, but another song (a song that’s in the same album, mind you) would have the older lyrics.
As time goes on, it’s going to make it to more songs.