Google experimentiert damit, Songtexte von YouTube Music hinter Paywall zu sperren | Nach einem langen Test macht YouTube Music Songtexte zu einer Premium-Funktion.
https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/02/google-locks-youtube-music-lyrics-behind-paywall/
34 Kommentare
The greed of Google when to comes to everything YouTube related is actually staggering, I’m expecting them to start charging per video watched/song played at this point.
*oh no* dont make me read them off a different webpage while the song is playing like we used to *oh no*
When Spotify has it for free?
Not like they used to just print the lyrics on the physical media for no up charge
You have to pray that no one figures out how to charge people for the air they breathe. These fucking corporations are so greedy that they will without a doubt charge people for the amount of oygent they inhale if they ever do.
The nickel & diming continues as always
I already pay, but does this mean that youtube music lyrics won’t suck now? They’re either unavailable or just listed plainly for any song that isn’t a top 0.001% song. I’m not sure how apple music has karaoke style lyrics for almost every song on their service.
Websites dedicated to music lyrics for free is as old as the internet… They’re not reinventing the wheel or anything here
Pay-walling disability accommodations is a bold move. Good thing they changed their motto, else this might be a concern.
Why would they lock lyrics behind a paywall, when there have been a million lyrics websites for forever?
I wonder if this move would run into American accessibility laws.
They need every cent before they move onto making us batteries.
Hey Gemini, can you display the lyrics? /s
Wow what an interesting experiment. I wonder what their hypothesis is.
lol…what?
But okay. I’ll just put captions on. Dicks.
keep squeezing that money
Damn YouTube, you better hope no search engine allows people to look up lyrics. /s
Remember that they bought a lot of the lyrics from MusiXMatch which wasd a goated, free shazam-like app that would give you lyrics in sync with the music ? Pepperidge farm remembers.
Anything to for another dollar!
YouTube music is already PART OF THE PREMIUM EXPERIENCE. Stop making Premium Pro XL plus Ultra Giga Sucklemymonopolistic Cock subscription tiers already
Really unimaginative and especially sad considering how forward leaning and creative Google was in the early years
Next big idea will probably be paywalling color video.
Don’t improve things to give users a reason to pay for premium. No, just make the free version increasingly crappy instead. Sounds about right for youtube. Soon there’s going to be ads breaks in the middle of ads.
Google has been so desperate for money since this AI investment phase came out.
Google business starter used to be $6 for just a business email domain + gmail. Now they back it with so much AI to justify the $18 per month price increase.
YouTube premium has gone up 2x for essentially doing nothing. I’ve figured out that if you switch your VPN to Albania, it doesn’t serve any ads. So now I don’t need to pay for YouTube premium. Like I give a shit that I can’t see lyrics for music videos anymore.
What I did for business email? Switched everything to iCloud+ since that also gives you a free business domain when you sign up for anything above the free tier for cloud storage. Google makes it really difficult to switch btw.
After bad bunny does the super bowl Google goes to lock lyrics.
screw deaf people, i guess. 😭
„why do you pirate all your music and sync it to your phone over syncthing“.
Lmfao
genius.com is about to get a nice little uptick in site traffic.
People need to just let youtube die already, the enshitification isn’t going to stop. Rip the bandaid off and move on.
I left Spotify for YTM.
I might just cancel my whole premium subscription and save myself the money. Ridiculous.
Youtube closed captions and volume going premium in 2027!
More enshittification.
They will get an ADA lawsuit pretty quick on that one, methinks.
I read most of the comments and didn’t see one about what might be the reason why they are doing this.
If you know a little bit about digital rights, you’ll know that lyrics are a different licence (you might need something like [lyricfind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LyricFind) for the licensing. And it cost a certain amount per view (if I remember correctly). Another licence(s) if you want to do karaoke style display.
If they don’t want to get sued, they probably have to pay a lot for that feature and report the use to the right organisations. That’s probably why they want to paywall it since they want to increase the revenue.
Oh joy, I’ll continue to use something else. Thanks for making that real easy youtube