How to Get Lyrics on Spotify, Apple Music and more
Adding your lyrics to streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music is an exciting way of engaging with your fans and enhancing your overall music marketing strategy.
It’s a quick and simple process that improves your fan’s experience, so buckle in and learn how to upload your lyrics to Spotify and Apple Music and let listeners discover the meaning behind your tracks.
How to add your lyrics to Spotify
With well over 200 million paying subscribers and a range of exclusive artist marketing tools, Spotify is key to successful music promotion in 2024.
One of these exciting artist features that users can make use of to widen the reach of their music is to add lyrics to Spotify.
This strategy is a great way to boost shares of your tracks online and generate more hype around your new releases. And, it’s free.
Here’s the steps:
Upload your music to Spotify
You can’t add your lyrics to stores unless your release is already available on the platforms, so your first step will be to upload it to Spotify via a music distributor like Ditto.
Our Release Builder is super simple to use and lets you select individual stores to send your music to.
So tick Spotify, complete your release and start building up anticipation for its launch! In the meantime, check out our tips on promoting your music to make sure your release date is as big as it can be.
Add your lyrics to Musixmatch or Genius
Once you’ve sent your music to Spotify, you’ll need to also upload your lyrics to Musixmatch.
Spotify uses this 3rd party service to license and sync up your lyrics on the platform so that they can be easily shared to social media.
If you’re in Japan, your Spotify lyrics will be managed by PetitLyrics instead of Musixmatch.
When adding your lyrics to Spotify, you’ll just need to follow these simple steps:
- Select a Musixmatch plan. Musixmatch offer a range of free and paid tiers to choose from so you just need to select the one that’s right for you.
- After you’ve chosen a plan, create a Musixmatch Pro account and fill out all of your info.
We suggest setting up your Musixmatch account with the same email address that you’ve used for Ditto, Spotify and any other music services to help keep things nice and organised.
Tips for uploading your lyrics
Although the process of getting your lyrics on streaming platforms is reasonably straightforward, there are still some ways in which you can further streamline things. Here are some of our top tips:
- Type out your lyrics out in their original language - without translations.
- Include all lyrics - don’t write stuff like "x2".
- Only write down the words sung in the song.
- Label different sections of your lyrics with tags like #VERSE and #CHORUS.
Verify your Spotify account
To get the most out of Spotify, we also recommend verifying your Spotify account.
This’ll not only open you up to a whole new world of exclusive artist features on Spotify that can help you track analytics and boost your reputation, but it’ll also make the process of updating your details or lyrics that little bit easier too.
Why should I put my lyrics on Spotify?
Adding your lyrics to Spotify and making them available for sharing makes them that much more meaningful - and creates a stronger bond between you and your fans. This is how they’ll connect to you as an artist and relate to your tracks on a deeper level.
It’ll also broaden the reach of your music, as Spotify allows users to select and share their favourite lyrics directly to their Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook or X accounts and send to their friends instantly.
If your lyrics are available on Spotify, fans can search for them instead of your track or artist name. Perfect for boosting your discoverability and gaining new followers.
How to see lyrics on Spotify
To find your lyrics on Spotify, your fans just need to tap on the "Now Playing View" while listening to a song and swipe up from the bottom of the screen.
If they love your lyrics enough, they can easily share them with friends too.
By tapping the "Share" button at the bottom of the lyrics screen, they can select the lyrics they want to share and choose whichever platform they want to send it to.
The process is pretty similar on desktop too. They can simply click on the microphone icon from the "Now Playing" bar and the lyrics will start scrolling in real-time alongside your song.
How long does Spotify take to upload lyrics?
This depends on a few things, like how efficient you are at entering all of your details correctly and which distributor you choose to release your music with.
When releasing music through Ditto, we’ll aim to get your music up on Spotify in just a couple of days. Some distributors take up to a couple of weeks to deliver music to Spotify and other stores. So if time is of the essence, Ditto has you covered.
Add lyrics to Apple Music
Spotify covered. Now it’s time to sort out your fans who use Apple Music too.
As quick and easy as it is to upload your lyrics to Spotify, it’s arguably even smoother sailing when doing so to Apple Music. All you need to do is follow these steps to send your lyrics directly to Apple through Ditto.
How to add lyrics on Apple Music
When you upload your release to Ditto, you'll also be able to upload your lyrics to certain stores including Apple Music. You'll be able to add your track lyrics in Stage 2 of the Release Builder under Track List.
Just click edit next to the track you want to add lyrics to and scroll down to Do you want to add lyrics?. Click Yes and add in your lyrics. Make sure to tick whether or not your release contains explicit content and you're good to go. It's that easy.
To avoid any hiccups when uploading your lyrics through Ditto, make sure to stick to the Apple Music lyrics guidelines.
Now you know how to get your lyrics up on Spotify and Apple Music, you need to keep up your promotion - both online and at shows. For more help with music promotion and music marketing, make sure to check out our Unsigned Advice blog for the latest tips to keep your content as fresh as possible.
