With over 550 Million users, Spotify is one of the largest music and podcast streaming services in the world. As of 2023, Spotify has amounted over 220 million subscribers– about 44 percent of users– paying for premium services, which includes no ads, offline streaming, and the ability to choose music instead of shuffling playlists.

In November 2021, Spotify began to work together with a community-ran lyric company known as Musixmatch to provide lyrics on their songs. Being community-run, these lyrics often have discrepancies or inaccuracies to them. 

However, since they were free to users, many held back their complaints. However, as of September 2023, almost 2 years after the original lyrics were introduced, Spotify has begun removing lyrics from non-paying individuals.

This implementation is at most annoying to the hearing community; not only are their lyrics removed, taking away easy accessibility to what the song is saying, but it also brings up the question of whether the lyrics are worth paying for.

As for the deaf and hard of hearing, however, this extraction is a debilitating accessibility issue. Many deaf individuals, even if they struggle to make out the music, enjoy feeling the vibrations and engaging in music in their own way. Being able to have the lyrics and understand the music as any hearing person would is important for accessibility, and taking this feature away can easily be described as Ableist.

Many in the deaf community are already speaking out on this issue. 

“It’s incredibly ableist to make deaf people pay to have the same access to music as everyone else,” said Leahajk, a deaf X user who speaks out for the hard-of-hearing community.

When asked why Google lyrics may not help, Leah explains that she Googles the lyrics but prefers Spotify’s syncing of lyrics to the song playing.

The paywall of lyrics doesn’t just affect the deaf community, however. In response to Leahajk’s post, another user states that as a non-English speaker, they need the lyrics as well.

“That’s a good chunk on how I learned English,” a commenter on Leahajk’s post said.

The paywall of lyrics affects many; providing a strict accessibility issue while putting sup-par lyrics behind an 11-dollar-a-month paywall.

**Statistics pulled from Spotify’s website. Comments and responses from X