Unless there’s some agreement / licensing thing prohibiting it, and considering that lyrics don’t change, they should be able to do some caching for a total of 1 API call per song
Surely the cost of lyrics (regardless of fetching API or royalties with caching) are miniscule compared to the other costs.
I assume they are not paying for the lyrics, but for the access to the api. The lyrics are also timed to the music and the service they use might do that for them. So, like you say, serving lyrics data costs very little, but that is not what they pay for.
And to add, I don’t really know anything about how this works behind the scenes.
You and I can do that but they’re not just caching they’re redistributing which requires royalties
It does unless they agree to let you redistribute the lyrics without one. Lyrics are copyrighted.
https://www.musicconnection.com/copyright-issues-scriped-entertainment-song-lyrics/
https://www.thelaw.com/law/are-song-titles-lyrics-protected-by-copyright-or-trademark-law.317/
You may get lucky and have a band that doesn’t care or won’t notice your operation, but Spotify has music from the big labels and they do care and they will notice.
Not sure why you got downvoted… storing text isn’t a lot of data, they can easily do it once per song and wrap it up.