Free the Lyrics YouTube - DTNS 5202

0:03This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, February 9th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know. We give you some important context. We try to help you understand. Today, why is YouTube putting song lyrics behind the paywall? We'll make our best guess. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm not done with it. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story. So, yeah, I picked this as our big story today because it was kind of the only story I saw on all of the places where I look at news. There were a lot of people picking different things as their top stories today, but this showed up everywhere. 9to5Google noting that YouTube Music's test of putting lyrics behind the paywall appears to be rolling out to everyone now.

0:49If and when it hits you as a free user, if you're a paid user, you'll still see lyrics fine. But if you're a free user, you'll see a message at the top of the lyrics tab screen that says you have X number of views remaining, depending on how many times you've viewed lyrics. unlock lyrics with premium and then it tells you how to pay for premium and get rid of that barrier apparently you can view lyrics five times before you have to pay that's what nine to five google says they found if you want to pay youtube music costs you eleven dollars a month or if you get youtube premium that's fourteen dollars a month and that not only includes youtube music but also other features like ad for youtube this was the only tech story on monday that wasn't about mark German's Apple newsletter that showed up everywhere I looked.

1:35Here's some of the things that I think contribute to this being getting a lot of buzz. Spotify started putting lyrics behind its paywall back in May 2024, you may remember, but by July, it was backtracking. It first started by raising the number of times you could view lyrics as a free user. Then it just stopped displaying the limit and they never said anything, but it's believed to be either a very high limit or non-existent. TechRadar notes that Spotify this week started offering basic lyrics for free users and just announced translations and offline access to lyrics for paid users. So that's adding features to paid users, not taking something away from free.

2:17Spotify also just launched About the Song for paid users. That gives you a little paragraph of background information on the song. And I went and looked around. Deezer, Tencent's music platforms like QQ and Kugo and Kuo and Amazon Music all offer lyrics to free users. So you can find lots of places that do offer this for free if you don't like that this is going behind the paywall for YouTube Music. Apple Music and Tidal don't offer free tiers. You can get a free trial, but they don't offer a free tier, so there's no comparison there. YouTube Music is the rare service that gives you a free version but is restricting the lyrics so this one really surprises me simply because there is a roadmap here spotify did this a couple years back and it did not work for them this didn't go well at all they were getting lambasted all over the internet until they changed it so it's very interesting to me that youtube is doing this now why are they doing well they want more money.

3:21If people are really liking those, those lyrics, then maybe they will subscribe. If we take them away from them, I understand the decision. What I don't understand is that with all the information that you have, why this is the decision that you made. Another part of this is that you are offering the music to people for free. There are people who can't hear so they can only read the lyrics. So you literally are taking that away from them. To me, that seems like this is an accessibility issue as much as it is you're just trying to make money on lyrics. It's like you literally have taken something that was accessible to people with hearing, you know, hearing loss, and now they have to pay you to get something that they were able to get, you know, get before.

4:03So that seems problematic as well. And like the internet is not happy about this, you know, as much as they were not happy about Spotify when they did it a few years back. Yeah, the accessibility argument is a really good one because you can say, well, it's free. You wouldn't have to offer it at all, and there are competitors, which is true. But if you are offering a service, it's not a great look to intentionally not offer accessibility without making someone have to pay to get it. I think that's probably the most compelling argument I've heard about this. The other things to consider when you're thinking about this is lyrics aren't free.

4:40YouTube has to pay someone, if they want to stay legal anyway. They have to pay someone to license the lyrics and get them on there. And the music isn't free. They have to pay someone to license the music. And so your free tier is subsidized through advertising. And it's pretty well documented that the music industry doesn't like to pay the same amount for free users as it does for paid users. The royalties are lower on the paid users because they just don't like free users. And so it costs companies more to provide music to free users. They have to make more in advertising to break even and make a profit.

5:21And lyrics cost money too. But there's the accessibility issue to consider. And there's the fact that Spotify tried this and received such a backlash that they decided the math didn't matter and kept the lyrics out there. I expect that YouTube thinks, well, but Spotify's main business is music. We can absorb this better. We can weather the backlash better. I assume that's what they're thinking. That is, that's an interesting take to take. We can probably get away with this. So we're going to do it. And that just doesn't bode well. There are things that you do that are a cost of you, but they are a benefit to your, you know, to your overall customer base.

6:07Did you just continue to do it? Even if it costs you a little bit, They're making so much more money on the ads and everything else that they make off of this. Because if you look at the other side of that coin, they are bigger than Spotify in this way. There is more stuff, so they can absorb it better. So the fact that you are still doing this makes it even seem more nefarious than what Spotify did. Let me try putting it another way. YouTube Music is an add-on. The main business is YouTube Premium. And so to them, it's like, eh, we lose some YouTube Music free users. they were never going to become premium subscribers anyway.

6:41So we're not bothered by that. Once again, I understand it. I understand it. It's just an interesting take for an organization of this size that does offer free service. You've got a blueprint in front of you. No one else is really doing this in your space. You're the only one. And the company that tried it, they failed miserably at it. Let's say that they didn't fail miserably. Let's just say that at some point they decided to do an about face and not telling anyone why or if there was a limit. There was a change there. So we will see what happens with, you know, with YouTube. They are the kind of company that is big enough to where they could absorb it.

7:20And maybe that's this is just a bottom line thing. We want to make more money by doing this. If you're free pay, if you don't, if you want it, you know, we're giving you a remedy. A lot of people don't like that, but like I said, they are a business. They are a for-profit. Google has never made any bones about that. I just think it is interesting that this is the place where you would actually make this kind of stance because Google has in the past, they have said things about we're trying to do things that are good for the world. This is not necessarily one of them. Yeah. And granted, this isn't as big of a deal, right?

7:55You could still listen to the music. You know, maybe people don't care as much about the lyrics. I don't know that YouTube expected this to get as much attention as it did today. And their gamble that, you know, the backlash over it will die down and people will forget looks like a little less sure of a gamble that maybe it did before they started rolling this out. I'm not in the corporate world anymore. I've been out of it now since before the pandemic, but we used to have things called steering committees and there was always someone on the steering committee who was the pessimist. Like what is the worst case scenario that you could think of was the job of the pessimist on that steering committee.

8:30I am shocked with all the evidence that Spotify has given you that no one thought that this is actually going to get some consternation. I'm sure someone thought that. It's just, they, they, they were argued, someone argued against them like, yeah, but that was a few years ago. Yeah. But YouTube music isn't as high profile as Spotify. Yeah. Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. Right. So we'll see this, this is what they're doing. They're going to still give you a, what is it? Five, you know, five, five free lyrics. You can use this. We'll see how that goes for them. I don't think that people are going to say, Oh, you know what?

9:03No problem. YouTube. I don't think that's coming, but we, we, we have to wait and see. DTS is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to Norm Fizikas, Chris Allen, Reed Fishler and our new patrons Bob, Carlos, Ed, John, Maddie, Bob and returning patrons Jody, Jeffrey, Mike and James. Two Bobs. It's a two Bob week. Welcome both Bobs. Good to have you and welcome back Jody, Jeffrey, Mike and James. Good to have everybody along supporting us at patreon.com slash DTNS. Come join them.

9:37All right, there's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. Thanks to RWNash for noting this one in our subreddit. Discord is rolling out age verification globally starting in early March. All users will be restricted to a teen-appropriate experience unless they verify they are an adult. The restricted experience blurs sensitive content and routes messages from people you may not know to a separate inbox. If verified as an adult, you can unblur content, change the setting to always unblur, and access age-restricted channels, servers, and app commands. You can also modify the message settings.

10:10Verify your age, you need to take a video selfie, which never leaves your device, or submit an ID to a third-party vendor, which are deleted quickly after verification. Some users may be required to do both, and both options may be added, or more options may be added as well. This follows Roblox's recent edition of mandatory facial verification for access to chat. Yeah, so this is the world we live in now you are presumed teen until proven otherwise uh i i think i may end up needing to do this because we use discord not only for dtns listeners as a perk on patreon but also uh to you know to talk to each other about stuff in the back channels uh and and i could see running into a setting or two at some point not because i want to you know view adult oriented stuff but just some setting where you're like oh you know you're you're not allowed to do that because you're on the teen account and I might have to verify.

11:02Me as well. And my gut tells me when I hit that, that'll be the time when I actually go make the, make the change. You know, am I going to go looking for it? It's like, if the account works for me the way it has always worked with teen settings, I'm cool with it. If not, I'll go update them when I need to, because there's something that I want access that I can't access. And as you said, this is kind of the world we're working with now. I think you're going to see more companies, not less, that are going to go down this route all right we got three actual scientific studies two published in peer-reviewed journals one one still being worked on uh to talk about today starting with this one uh we'll give you the good news first scientists from research hospital uh organization mass general brigham that combines a couple of hospitals research hospitals together published a study in nature neuroscience that It shows a foundation model called Brain IAC can use routine MRIs to predict dementia risk, detect brain tumor mutations, and predict brain cancer survival chances.

12:05Brain IAC stands for Brain Imaging Adaptive Core. It was trained on close to 49 ,000 unlabeled brain MRI scans, and it performed better than more limited models that were trained on annotated data. So this was a self-supervised learning. It's basically medium-sized. Instead of training it on everything, they just trained it on the brain MRI scans. But instead of doing labeling and very limited, you know, focus training to make sure it does something, they sort of let it learn on its own the way an LLM does. And it performed better than those more limited models that were trained on annotated data.

12:41study validated performance on seven distinct tasks and performed well when training data was scarce or when task complexity was high. So after it was trained, then it might be given more training data to go after a specific task, and it did well if it didn't have a lot of data. This is especially promising since training data for neurological diseases does not usually generalize well across populations. So for diagnosticians, this is going to end up being a very valuable aid. I have for a couple of years now, I've been very, very excited about where AI can assist in medical diagnoses, because one of the problems that we have with a doctor diagnosing you is that they can only do it based off of their own experience and what they can remember.

13:28Whereas this, we can Let's just run all the studies through this and see what we get. And it gives you better outcomes. Now, there's downsides. You would never want insurance companies potentially getting access to this because they might say, you know what, you're high risk. We want to charge you more for your insurance or something like that. But I'm always impressed when we can actually take what humans can't do, use AI to just enhance that because they're not doing the diagnosis. The doctor is still going to say, you might need to go look at this. But you're giving doctors tools that allow them to do their jobs more effectively.

14:01And I am all for that. Yeah. And just to underline that, this is pointing a doctor in a direction, right, to say, hey, this brain tumor seems to be mutating. This patient seems to have higher dementia risk. And then if you're doing that in a way that a doctor couldn't look at the MRI and see it, just like a large language model is able to find patterns that we can't, it finds this pattern. then the doctor can go okay well then i'm going to do these tests to follow up and see or just say like hey we're going to continually monitor you for this uh until such time as we see the demonstration then we'll be able to catch it earlier catching it early always a good thing so yeah i think this is this is a good one a report published on harvard business review discusses findings from an eight-month study of how 200 employees at a u.s-based technology company used generative models in their work.

14:54The company did not mandate the use of the tools. The research is in progress, but so far it's found that the employees worked faster, took on broader scope of tasks, and worked more hours voluntarily. Workers reported that the tools made doing more feel possible and rewarding. Specifically, workers took on tasks that have belonged to others, like writing code or reviewing code written by non-engineers, doing quick work with prompts during lunchtime or other breaks, causing less recovery time, and more multitasking, leading to more expectations or more pressure. The authors recommend building in guidelines to prevent burnout.

15:29Yeah, this is one of those studies that I think overturns a bias we have, which is, you know, if someone has a tool to make their job easier, that means they'll work less. And it turns out over and over and over again. Look at the advent of mechanization, the advent of home tools like laundry machines and such and microwaves. Look at the advent of computers themselves. When we get these tools, we feel like, oh, we can do more. Yeah. Are there some people who always want to do less? Of course. But your average person is like, ah, the tedious, boring part is done. I can actually just type in a prompt.

16:09That feels great. I feel so productive. And these authors in advance of their publication are saying, you know what, we think it's important to let companies know, like, you need to be wary of this because you will burn out your employees and actually lower productivity if you're not careful. Because just like we overeat fats and sugars because they taste good and we evolved to go for them, we might overdo it with these kinds of tools because they allow us to feel good about being productive. My very first job out of grad school was working in IT was basically debugging bad code, not even bad code, just debugging code for Y2K.

16:49I lasted in that role for three weeks because it was absolutely excruciating. If this is what coding is, I don't want anything to do with it. if I would have had some LLMs or something back then that could have made that tedious job less tedious and maybe it would give me the opportunity to do some other things, I might have lasted longer than three weeks. And, you know, fortunately, I didn't last. And you and I are now having the conversation. My life has been completely different. But as you said, we think that productivity means you're going to do less. It's like, no, productivity, you know, increased productivity gives you the ability to do more.

17:25And most good workers, that's what they'll actually do, which is being highlighted here in this report. Yeah. Yeah. No, I thought it was an interesting recommendation to say like, Hey, build in pauses into the workday. You're, you're going to have to make people take a break because the natural things that cause them to take a break, uh, may, may not exist anymore. If these tools are used the way this study shows. Yeah. If you think about that, it's like, I'm getting stressed out by my job. I need to take a break right now. So you're not getting stressed out. So you don't feel like you need to take a Yeah, you definitely want to build some governors in here.

17:59Hey, get up, walk around, move away from your desk. But we've got those. My watch is notifying me right now as I say this to get up and take some steps. That's a good point. There's plenty of tools for it. And then finally, a study published in Nature Medicine from the Oxford Internet Institute and the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford tested how well LLMs did at helping people diagnose their own medical conditions. They wanted to say, hey, these LLMs are passing medical board tests. Can they act as a doctor? If you go in and say, hey, this is what's happening, give me some advice.

18:32So they did a controlled study. That's important. So they had people who weren't doing the LLMs trying to diagnose themselves other ways. And they looked at 1 ,298 people in the UK who were randomly assigned GPT-4-0, so not the latest open AI, GPT-4-0, LAMA-3, or Coheres Command-R. So potentially more modern LLMs might be better at this, but I think the study's finding is sort of interesting no matter what model we're talking about, but we'll get to that. The participants were told to, quote, make decisions about a medical scenario as though they had encountered it at home. So no, we weren't putting people at risk by saying, like, you know, take that abscess and ask ChatJPT about it.

19:22They were given a scenario and told, like, okay, pretend this is happening to you. how would you talk to the LLM about it? And here's the key. When the scientists gave the LLMs the full text of each one of these scenarios, the models did great. They correctly identified conditions in 94.9 % of cases. That is perfectly acceptable. However, when people were allowed to present the cases in their own words and ask their own questions, so not giving the full text of the scenario just saying, hey, you know, I've got this headache or whatever. The LLMs identified relevant conditions in fewer than 34.5 % of cases.

20:01Why? The authors of the study suspect people just aren't good at providing the information needed to make a diagnosis. I don't suspect it. I know it for a fact. People cannot effectively tell you what's going on with them. It's just a thing that people are not good at. I, you know, I, you know, at one point was an EMT. At one point, I actually was, you know, intending to be a doctor. So I did an entire year of medical school. And these things that people tell you are just about themselves are simply just not true, which is one of the reasons why you can say, are you pregnant? Somebody will say no.

20:37And then they run the test and you are not that you are lying. You just didn't know what you were at the time you were asked the question. So, you know, so we still need medical personnel to help diagnose things. Now, it's one thing, if you got a splinter, you probably can diagnose that. You know, if you, you know, if you got a toothache and you bit down on something hard, you probably, you know, I probably need to go to the dentist, but you still want a medical professional to take a look at you because they have spent a decade or more of schooling to help understand what is going on with people that they talk to.

21:07So this, this does not shock me at all i i'm i'm not surprised by this at all the the other reaction i had to this study is oh this explains good doctors and bad doctors in in human terms good doctors are the ones who can pick up on what you're not telling them who can ask nuanced questions who can probe a little and go well wait a minute when you said it hurt like this uh the the doctors that don't do as well and they exist are the ones that aren't as good at that who are who are acting like an llm and just going by the book and saying, well, if you said this, I'm going to do that. And so I think the solution here, like you said, for the time being, you know, don't rely on this.

21:49You can use this as a research tool, but go to your doctor. Don't try to treat yourself with one of these. It's not ready yet. But to improve these and get them to where they can be a helpful first line of defense to pass you along to a doctor, they need to be able to pick up on nuance. And that's a big question on whether an LLM could ever do that effectively or not. Absolutely. And it's Monday, so we've got some tidbits to pass along from Mark Gurman's Power One newsletter from Bloomberg. The iPhone 17e is coming with the Apple modem and a A19 chip from the iPhone 17 with no price increase from the current price of$599.

22:28New iPads with the A18 chip and the iPad Airs with the M4 are coming, but with no major design changes. A new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros and a MacBook Pro Air with an M5 processor is coming. A less expensive 13-inch MacBook running on the iPhone chip is coming. And even an updated studio display and new Mac minis. Product launch is currently slated for as early as week two of March. And Gurman also says Apple expects to deliver the first beta version of iOS 26.4 to developers the first week of, or not the first week of February, but the week of February 23. Yeah, and March 2nd, as early as March 2nd, could be later, of course.

23:04that's the important date for me that's why I'm zeroing in on that because I would like an excuse to make myself update my 5 year old MacBook Pro and a 16 inch MacBook Pro with an M5 processor would be just the ticket so I am looking forward to that I think the star of the show is that 13 inch MacBook running on an iPhone chip I'm very curious on how Apple intends to take on Chromebooks and cheaper laptops and try to move into that space a little with a less powerful but also less expensive chip that they market to folks. We have for years, and this is not the case any longer, I've always said, well, Mac, there's a Mac tax.

23:43You've got to pay more to get a Mac. That has not really been the case for, you know, when you're looking at the same class. The problem now is that, you know, you can get very low-end laptops that are running Chrome OS or even running Windows. They just don't have a lot of hardware in them, and that's where you're still getting edged out to where, you know, getting that, you know, that, that low end Mac, uh, MacBook air was still a couple hundred dollars more expensive with this iPhone chip. And it may not be. Yep. Uh, well folks, if you want some honest reviews from people who actually buy and live with their tech, you will need to check out live with it.

24:16Sarah lane hosts it weekly, uh, looking at tech that both she and others she's talking to have spent months living with because they used it because they needed it. We've got great stuff in there. Our editor, Hammond, was talking about the tour box accessory he uses for video editing on the most recent one. I've been in there talking about Opus Clip. It's coming out in a couple of weeks. Listen to Live With It wherever fine podcasts are traded or sold or watch at youtube.com slash daily tech news show.

24:49Let's finish up with some quick headlines that are just good to know and are the kind of thing that are going to make you feel a little smarter. because you know them. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees in a Slack message that the company plans to launch a new model within ChatGPT later this week and that ChatGPT is back to exceeding 10 % monthly growth. All right. Following the release of Linux 6.19 stable kernel, Linus Torvalds said he's out of fingers and toes. So the next kernel will be called Linux 7.0. The European Commission sent a statement of objections to Meta because WhatsApp business API does not allow for the use of competing large language models, but it can defend itself before action is taken.

25:30DuckDuckGo launched a new opt-in feature for Duck.AI, which is powered by OpenAI, but is privacy enhanced. You can now do real-time voice chat through an encrypted relay connection. SpaceX announced it will start focusing on building a lunar base within the next 10 years, while it continues to work on a Mars mission within the next 20 years. We're going to the moon first. Okay. Alibaba's Quen chatbot, that's spelled Q-W-E-N, had to stop issuing coupons to users after unexpected high demand. It was part of a promotion with China's Spring Festival. They got 10 million orders in the first nine hours.

26:09impressive the semiconductor industry association based on world semiconductor trade statistics estimates the global semiconductor industry is on track for more than one trillion dollars that's one trillion with the t folks dollars in sales in 2026 up over the 791.7 billion dollars in 2025 a lot of tips gonna get bought this year uh youtube tv announced its new bundles with fewer channels and lower prices uh base plan for youtube tv is 83 a month the new plans uh include a$65 a month sports plan. There's also a sports plus news plan for$72 a month, an entertainment plan,$55 a month, and a news plus entertainment plus family plan that is$70 a month.

26:54So I'm going to just move back to cable. It seems like it's cheaper. It's not, sadly, but yeah, I know what you mean. Sony scheduled a state of play announcement for PlayStation games that will last more than an hour starting at 5 p.m. Eastern time, Thursday, February 12th. Yeah, everybody's buzzing about this because it's going to be so long. They're expecting some big announcements. Well, folks, we end every episode of DTNess with some shared perspectives. And today, Mattia has some thoughts on vibe coding. Yes, Mattia writes, Wall Street's anxiety over vibe coding might be misplaced. I don't think the threat is AI creating everything from scratch.

27:32Instead, it's AI making existing alternatives easier to use. First, AI is already eating into software stickiness. I use AI to handle data rather than struggling with pivot tables. This undermines the need for Excel's specialized features without needing to replace the entire ecosystem. Second, the biggest threat lies in how I see AI agents acting in the future as a bridge for the open source gap. Commercial software wins because it's polished and integrated. Open source is powerful, but often clunky, buggy, or fragmented. In the future, I see AI agents acting as the missing interface, cobbling together multiple open source tools to match what a commercial suite does today.

28:13For example, an agent could bridge the gap between complex command line tools or open source editors like GIMP to provide a workflow that rivals Photoshop. When agents make difficult free software as easy to use as a paid subscription, the commercial value proposition collapses. I like that GIMP example because you know what GIMP is compared to Photoshop? Infinitely less expensive because it's free$99. Yeah, exactly. And it is as powerful as Photoshop. It is not as easy to use. But I think Mattia is right. I don't think anybody knows just how much of an effect this might have if suddenly the free version becomes as easy to use because you can just say what you want to happen and the agent goes and makes it work.

29:00Yeah, that's definitely a thing. And there's another part of this is too, people are really starting to have subscription fatigue. So, you know, if you're using Photoshop, you're paying them every month to use Photoshop. If you're using Premiere, you're paying them every month to do it. So if we start seeing open source tools just get easier to use because we can put a agent in front of them that makes it prettier. And you just talk to the agent, kind of tell it what you want. You get something that reflects what you would have gotten outside of, you know, out of Photoshop. that is not a bad position to be for these agents.

29:31The caveat is the open source ecosystem works well in part because people who are power users and code their own enhancements contribute those back to the environment. Another problem that open source is having right now is floods of submissions for bug reports or things like that because agents and coding tools are doing them and humans have to wade through all of that. So we're going to have to create a way to square that circle, to solve that so that if I vibe code an extension to GIMP and it works, can I submit it back to the open source project in a safe way that doesn't totally spam the developers of GIMP?

30:17A lot of question marks in how that ecosystem could work, but if that all gets worked out, I think Mattia is right. it becomes pretty compelling. Absolutely. Folks, what are you thinking about? If you've got some insights into a story, please, please, please share them with us at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Yes, thanks to Mattia for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You keep us in business. You can support us by being a patron, get access to our Discord and all kinds of cool bonus features at patreon.com slash DTNS.

30:55The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.