YouTube Music rolls outs Premium paywall for lyrics
YouTube Music Premium is becoming mandatory for accessing lyrics.
- YouTube Music is introducing a Premium paywall for accessing its Lyrics feature.
- Google has been testing lyrics as an exclusive Premium feature since September 2025.
- Lyrics will be limited for Free YouTube Music subscribers to just five songs per month.
Google is making it harder to view song lyrics with a Free YouTube Music account. Since September 2025, the company has been testing lyrics as an exclusive Premium feature. Now, Redditors and 9to5Google have noticed a paywall that limits lyric access to those with a YouTube Premium or Music Premium subscription.
Starting this week, Free YouTube Music subscribers will receive just five lyrics per month before they must subscribe. Afterwards, you’ll only see the first few lines, and everything else will be blurred and unscrollable. The middle tab in the Now Playing screen will then display a banner at the top warning users about their remaining lyrics views. This is equipped with a countdown and prompts such as “You have [x] views remaining” and “Unlock lyrics with Premium.”
This change comes two years after Spotify made lyrics available to its Free subscribers. This raises the question of whether YouTube Music represents value for money. For context, YouTube Music Premium costs $10.99/month and includes ad-free playback, background listening, offline downloads, and AI features, such as Ask Music. YouTube Premium costs $13.99/month and extends those features to the YouTube app.
Despite its questionable policy shift, Alphabet reported exceptional Q4 2025 results this week. This revealed that the company has “over 325 million paid subscriptions across consumer services, with strong adoption for Google One and YouTube Premium.” Revenue from YouTube adverts and subscriptions grossed over $60 billion last year.
