Spotify Is Getting a Lyrics Button for Laptop Karaoke Sessions

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Useful for the next time you feel like brushing up on R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” (Via Spotify)

Next time you have an itch for karaoke, you needn’t look further than your laptop.

Spotify, the fast-growing music-streaming service, has added the ability to see a song’s lyrics as you’re listening to it, per a company blog post.

The new feature, which will roll out on the service’s desktop app over the next couple of weeks, allows you to simply press a button labeled “Lyrics” next to the Play bar to make the words of the tune appear. It also allows you to search for lyrics in a database of popular songs.

Powered by a database named Musixmatch, this is not the first of the homemade karaoke features to grace Spotify’s app. Premium subscribers of yore might remember TuneWiki, which did virtually the same thing as this new feature. It was quietly shut down to, we assume, make room for this mainstream product.

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Musixmatch’s front-and-center integration with Spotify’s desktop program is further evidence that the vast Premium subscriber app library, though incredibly valuable, may simply be an auditioning ground for a full-time partnership with the streaming service. And once that happens, competitors will be squashed.

Either way, you’ll finally be able to get that confusing T. Swift lyric about “Starbucks lovers” straight.

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