As an avid Apple Music user for over 5 years, I often find myself wanting to sing along to songs but not knowing all the words. Thankfully, Apple Music has a great built-in lyrics feature that makes it easy to follow along with your favorite tunes.
Table of Contents
Enabling Lyrics in Settings
Before you can view lyrics in the Apple Music app, you need to enable the lyrics feature in Settings:
- Open the Settings app on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch
- Scroll down and tap on Music
- Under Lyrics & Music Videos, switch on Show Apple Music Lyrics
This will allow lyrics to be displayed automatically in the Apple Music app whenever they are available for a song.
Viewing Lyrics in the Now Playing Screen
Once lyrics are enabled, they will appear automatically on the now playing screen when you play a song that has synced lyrics available:
- While a song is playing, simply tap on the album artwork to expand the now playing screen
- This will display a scrollable view of the song’s lyrics synced line-by-line to the audio
- You can scroll through the lyrics to keep up with the song you are listening to
The text size can be adjusted to make the lyrics easier to read – simply use the lyric text resizing button in the bottom left corner of the lyrics view.
Viewing Full Lyrics for a Song
In addition to the real-time synced lyrics view, you can also access the full static lyrics for a song:
- Tap on the Now Playing bar at the bottom of the screen
- This will open the now playing interface with info on the currently playing song
- Tap on the Lyrics tab which shows the song’s full unsynced lyrics
From here you can scroll through and read all the lyrics at your own pace, without them automatically advancing line-by-line.
Searching for Songs with Lyrics
You can also search Apple Music specifically for tracks that have lyrics available:
- Open the Search tab in Apple Music
- Enter the name of an artist, album or song
- Tap on Filters at the top of the screen
- Under Lyrics, switch Has Lyrics to the On position
This will filter the search results to only show those songs that have lyrics available to view.
Following Along in Real Time
My favorite way to use the Apple Music lyrics feature is to follow along with songs in real time as I sing or rap along to my favorite tracks.
The synced lyrics view scrolls line-by-line automatically making it almost effortless to read the lyrics – it’s like having a teleprompter built into the app! I often have friends and family do impromptu karaoke by passing my phone around and having everyone take turns singing with the lyrics.
