Spotify Will Now Let You Search For A Song By Its Lyrics

There’s nothing worse than hearing a great song, memorising a few lyrics, and forgetting to turn your Shazam on in time to find out what it is. D’oh!

This may have been more of a problem pre-pandemic, when a lot of us were out and about in shops and nightlife spots, bombarded by whatever was coming out of the speakers. It’s still easy to hear a snatch of a great track and not know what it is, however, and stepping in to save the day is Spotify, which is now rolling out the option to search a song by its lyrics. Yes, you read that correctly, music lovers.

While this isn’t totally revolutionary tech – Apple Music has had this option for a few years now – it is a first for Spotify. Lyric search is available on both iOS and Android; all you need to do is type your lyrics in the search bar and possible matches will surface. Spotify designer Lina Wang demonstrated the magic at work on Twitter yesterday, October 5.

Earworms better watch out then, but note that as of now this doesn’t seem to be available to all users yet; UNILAD has the latest Spotify update, but is sadly drawing blanks on this cool feature at the moment.

This isn’t the first time Spotify has dipped its toes into the lyrical side of music. A few months ago, the company introduced real-time lyrics provided by Musixmatch to select markets. There’s also the Interactive Experience offered to bigger singles and albums, where song info comes up for the track you’re listening to. That mode isn’t an ideal solution for housebound karaoke though, as lyrics pop up in between the various factoids, meaning you never get all the lyrics in one go. Now that would be another dream feature if you’re reading, Spotify.

Spotify listeners who already have access to the feature are finding that some searches result in an album coming up as opposed to the track in question. This was the case for Twitter user Krishna Sundarram, who used a rather obscure search query.

It also remains to be seen whether the search function works with translations of a foreign language track made up of English characters, or the original characters of the language being sung.

We also wonder how the app will work with ‘do doo doos’ and ‘ohs’. You know, basically the filler lyrics that almost every pop song ever made is made up of.