Deafness isn't binary, they could be capable of hearing the music but not making out the lyrics.

So I'm not deaf, not in the slightest, but I struggle to understand lyrics in music. I love music, I live and breathe it and I'm gonna dedicate my life to it, but I've always struggled with understanding lyrics in music. To me, the vocalist is just another instrument in the mix. Having lyrics to read helps me appreciate my favorite tunes more!

Seems like they could just Google the lyrics and read that.

But I guess Spotify lyrics do give an idea on the pace of the song.

Long shot guess: deaf person can "listen" to vibrations of music with their hands on a speaker but this is not possible with lyrics?

it's their prerogative to try and get people to pay for the service.

Except that this attempt could easily be shown to largely land on folks with accessibility needs. That's a big no-no under many laws.

An interesting comparison is pay-to-ride elevators. For most folks an elevator is a nice convenience they would not mind occasionally paying for.

But for some folks, the elevator is completely essential. This dynamic resulted in making pay-to-ride elevators illegal in most places, today.

hiding accessibility features behind a pay wall is disgusting, because only people with disabilities have to pay for it. *edit if you're downvoting, just let me know so I can block all of the ableists running around this community. **edit 2 - c'mon guys, why are you afraid to name yourselves?

But seeing as it’s a free account, it’s their prerogative

Oh, so not charging money magically exempts companies from meeting ADA accessibility requirements for their public accommodations?

Edit: what I'm taking issue with is the notion that being on the free tier of service changes anything. Maybe Spotifiy has an obligation or maybe it doesn't, but either way, it's the same regardless of how much or little the customer pays. Being a second-class customer does not make you a second-class citizen who doesn't get equal protection under the law!

Prime Video - 'hold my hat'

I have Tidal. It costs the same as Spotify but pays artists more and actively promotes up and coming musicians. Also they aren't part of the military industrial complex, so that's cool.

I used to like Spotify. Right now YT music feels just way better. No fluff yet, just music. Plus all of the unofficial covers which are on YT are on YT music

I don’t feel locked in, since there are no Spotify originals etc

I don't use Spotify so correct me if I'm wrong. But I think Spotify has podcasts that are only available there.

I told my wife about other open source apps that have music without ads, and even though it had the music, there were some podcasts that were not available without Spotify premium outside of Spotify.

While I mostly agree, there is a difference. In Spotify, you can play a song and it highlights the lyrics as they are sung

fuck off, it's not that simple. Spotify you can't just play whatever and also you can skip like 5 songs per hour or whatever the fuck. Charging for lyrics is fucking ridiculous and you saying just google it isn't any better.

Some people use deaf and hard of hearing interchangeably.

Unless there's some agreement / licensing thing prohibiting it, and considering that lyrics don't change, they should be able to do some caching for a total of 1 API call per song

Deafness covers a broad spectrum of hearing difficulty, not just completely deaf. Most people that identify as deaf still have some hearing. I always forget that and had the same question as you until I read a comment further down.

It's likely that the person isn't fully deaf and so can still hear some music, but deaf enough that they can't understand the lyrics. Having the ability to view the lyrics in real time is handy rather than having to search them up all the time. Spotify also shows what lyric is currently being sung in real time, whereas you can't get that with a Google search.

paying $15 a month to listen to anything I want instantly is worth it

Family plan is insanely good value especially if you fill it with friends (20$ for 6). If I were paying $15 for myself, never.

you can just crack the APK to use it for free.

How would one go about this? So I can avoid doing it accidentally, of course.

Oh that's cool.

This is actually really cool. And now I wonder if you could use this to produce music specifically designed for haptics only

Could you add wrong lyrics to songs for me...

Me too. Migrating to Tidal was extremely easy. They even imported my Spotify playlists and follows. And they are cheaper. Fuck Spotify.

I may have to try that again: at the time I got too many complaints from my kids. Now Spotify hugely increased prices, probably to pay for its attempt to collect Podcasts that I’m not interested in.

Unfortunately I agreed with my kids: other music services just don’t works as well

The lyrics on Spotify play along/highlight as the song plays so you can read along in time with the song.

This is actually a vital accommodation for the hard of hearing and partially Deaf because we can often hear/feel the beat and sometimes the melody, but we don't know exactly where in the song were up to because the tune of all the versus sounds the same, or vocal breaks of "ooooooh, lalala" can be mistaken for the start of a new line of lyrics.

So if you're just reading along with a static page of lyrics, it takes a lot of mental energy to figure out what's happening with the song, especially if it's a new song you're discovering.

We've had static lyric sheets for decades, you'd unfold the sleeve in your record and try to read along as you listened, never 100% sure you were doing it right unless a fully hearing friend was there to point at the words and be your version of the bouncing ball.

So to have this technology that almost completely solves this problem for a vulnerable community... Then to put it behind a pay wall despite the fact that Deaf people are more likely to be underemployed and socially disadvantaged than the general hearing populous is just callous.

Our experience of music is fundamentally different to hearing people, and yet Spotify will charge us the same rate for a sub par experience.

most music I can’t understand what someone singing

Just like the rest of us, tbh.

Everyone is going on about this as anti disability, but why does a disability entitle you to a service that's paid?

Unpaid Spotify sucks, full stop, no matter what part of you works or doesn't.

I agree, but unfortunately, there's probably not a good self hosted solution to this specific problem.

I use musicbrainz for music tagging, which is an excellent source for all metadata except lyrics. For better or worse, the only decent sources of lyrics seems to be genius and musixmatch, and neither integrate well with tagging tools like musicbrainz Picard.

If anyone else has found an easier way to do this, I would love to hear it.

(I don't know how to pirate or self host but I think you're cool).

They're complaining that the limited, free-tier plan is worse than it used to be. And really, for no good reason.

When EA releases Star Wars 2: A Sense Of Pride And Accomplishment, we complain about how stupid that is, do we not?

Can you tell me what that is?

Coming from the age of ipods and piracy, Spotify was a great alternative to that and reasonably priced for the usage you could get out of it. These days is harder to justify

Talking about lyrics specifically?; they probably didn't. That's no reason to not make things more accessible to people with disabilities though. It's about quality of life and making sure people with disabilities have equitable access.

If having the lyrics available is an essential part of being able to enjoy the music, it should be as equally accessible as the music is.

Because the people with working ears get the lyrics for free