Spotify adds real time lyrics to its streaming apps using Musixmatch technology and rolling it out to 26 countries in Latin America, South-East Asia and India. So far there is no indication as to when or if this will be made available to North America, Europe and Africa but is likely to be an issue over licensing rather than a technology constraint. Lyrics are not usually supplied to streamers by the record company or music publishers and lyrics firms such as Musixmatch and Genius (who provide Spotify’s ‘Behind the Lyrics’ feature) rely on fans to transcribe the lyrics in a crowd sourced fashion.
The countries where real time lyrics have gone live include Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, El Salvador, Uruguay, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong.
Musixmatch also provide lyric support to Google, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Amazon Alexa with over 70 million active users and over 7 million lyrics in 80 supported languages. The company has web and mobile (iOS and Android) apps and an API which facilitates features like sharing lyrics to Instagram.
