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YouTube Music can now show lyrics on its iOS and Android apps

YouTube Music can now show lyrics on its iOS and Android apps

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But lyrics aren’t supported on the web player yet

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

YouTube Music users can now read lyrics while listening to a song on the service’s iOS and Android apps, the company announced today. To see lyrics, when you’ve got a song open in the app, just tap the “i” button on the left side of the screen. The lyrics will then show up under the tracking bar for the song.

Here’s what the lyrics screen looks like for me for Tame Impala’s “One More Year” on the YouTube Music iOS app:

Apple Music and Spotify can also show lyrics while you’re playing a song, and on some songs, those services can advance lyrics forward in real time as the song is playing. Right now, all of YouTube Music’s lyrics are static, so you have to scroll down manually if you want to follow along with the track.

It appears that not every song has lyrics. I looked for them on songs on two recently-released albums — Childish Gambino’s 3.15.20 and Jay Electronica’s A Written Testimony —and they weren’t there. YouTube tells The Verge that it gets updated lyrics from LyricFind on a daily basis, but it didn’t share a timeline for how long it might take to source lyrics for specific songs.

Lyrics aren’t supported in YouTube Music’s web player right now, but YouTube says the feature is actively being worked on.