YouTube Music listeners love seeing the lyrics to their favorite songs, and the platform now offers static song lyrics for all users.
YouTube Music offering static song lyrics for all users
The new static song lyrics allow users to see the words to their favorite songs. These lyrics are static, meaning they don’t disappear from line to line but remain for users to read from beginning to end.
The purpose of static lyrics
Music lovers appreciate reading the words to songs. Songs are not just rhythm, beat, and instrumentation. All these things are important to a song, but so are the words. Without words, a song is just an instrumental chordal arrangement. In the absence of words, “songs” are left up to personal, subjective interpretation.
Without words, songs are still powerful but lack normal human communication. A musical arrangement communicates emotion, but words tell a story in a way that mere musical arrangement cannot. Words can get inside a human head, heart, and mind when the rhythm cannot.
It’s a normal human tendency to want to read the words to a song. After all, artists perform songs, and the way they perform them is to sing the words. Even when they hear an instrumental arrangement of a song, music lovers will often sing the words of the song. To true music lovers, music is incomplete without words.
YouTube understands this human tendency. It’s also the case that, YouTube being a Google company, Google is aware of how many search engine users listen to a song on YouTube while searching for lyrics on the search engine.
It’s intuitive, and adding static lyrics to excellent service is giving customers what they want.
YouTube Music isn’t the first service to offer words to songs. Others, such as Pandora, already provide words to songs. In this regard, YouTube Music is catching up, though it’s always better late than never.
Making YouTube Music Better: New Features
Adding words to songs is just one of a host of new features YouTube has brought to YouTube Music in the past year. Last year, the company announced it would partner with UMG to remaster 1,000 YouTube videos by the end of 2020. The remastered videos would rise from standard definition (SD, 480p) to high definition (HD, 720p).
Whether this is accomplished this year is up in the air. YouTube is lowering video resolution from 720p to 480p in the European Union in light of the coronavirus crisis. More recently, YouTube is now downloading video quality worldwide due to global internet traffic congestion.
Last but not least, the new Library Upload feature allows users to upload their music libraries to the cloud. This officially fixes one common complaint about the service and puts it on par with Google Play Music, Google’s former music service.
The new song lyrics are available for both free and paid YouTube Music members on both Android and iOS.