iOS 14.5 lets you share lyrics straight from Apple Music; here’s how

One of the cool new features in iOS 14.5 beta 2 is the ability to share lyrics directly from Apple Music. In fact, Apple has built out a custom UI flow to share up to 150 characters of real-time lyrics with friends, straight from the Now Playing screen. Here’s how to share lyrics from Apple Music.

iOS 14.5 includes various changes, from new emoji to Shortcuts and Podcasts. The Apple Music app has also seen its fair share of improvements, including the ability to manage your Up Next queue from the song list just by swiping to the left.

As far as lyrics are concerned, Apple rolled out the new real-time lyrics screen back in iOS 13. You could tap on a sentence to jump to that part of the song, but long-pressing on a lyric snippet previously did nothing. Well, that’s all changed now…

How to share lyrics from Apple Music

1. With iOS 14.5, start playing a song in Apple Music and open the lyrics view from the Now Playing interface.
2. Jump to the segment of the song you would like to share, to bring the corresponding lyrics into view.
3. Long-press on a lyric to share.
4. The long-press gesture opens an inline share sheet, which shows a mini-view of the lyrics from the song.
5. You can change your selection directly from the share sheet; just tap on lines of lyrics from the share sheet.
6. There’s a 150 character limit to share, which works out to about 5 lines of lyrics for a typical song.
7. With lyrics selected, then tap an app to share with. You can send to all your usual social networking apps like Messages, Instagram and Facebook Messenger.

The actual content that is shared is a rich representation of the lyrics and possibly interactive depending on where you share it. Share to your Instagram or Facebook story, and the Music app generates a very pretty sticker design featuring the lyrics in the center of the screen. When you share with Messages, the recipient sees a preview of the lyrics inline including a button to actually play the matching audio snippet from the song, right from the conversation thread.

iOS 14.5 is currently in developer beta and is expected to be released to everyone in the spring.

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