PeekabopBuy · €9.99Spotify lyrics on your Mac, without the Spotify window
Spotify has lyrics, but only while its window is open and in front of you. Peekabop puts them where you can see them anyway: right under your MacBook’s camera, lighting up word by word, while Spotify stays in the background.
The problem with Spotify’s lyrics on a Mac
In the Spotify desktop app, the lyrics live in a panel of the main window. The moment you switch to your browser, your editor or a call, they’re gone. Keeping them visible means giving Spotify a big chunk of your screen, and it has no floating or always-on-top lyrics window.
How Peekabop shows them instead
Peekabop is a small menu bar app. It sees what Spotify is playing and how far in you are, finds the song’s timed lyrics, and sings along in one of four displays:
- Notch: an island grows out of the camera, just wide enough for the line.
- Pill: a floating pane of glass you can drag anywhere, or lock so clicks pass through.
- Subtitles: big captions along the bottom of the screen, just above the Dock.
- Stage: full screen, with the artwork behind, for singing along properly.
Each word lights up as it’s sung, with one of sixteen effects (soft lift, neon, bouncing ball, sparkles, fireworks…). Skip, scrub or pause in Spotify and the lyrics follow.
Setting it up
- Download Peekabop and open it. It lives in the menu bar, with no Dock icon.
- Play a song in the Spotify desktop app.
- The first time, macOS asks whether Peekabop may control Spotify. Allow it: that’s how it reads the track and the playback position.
That’s it. There is no account and nothing to connect to your Spotify login.
Where the lyrics come from
Peekabop looks the song up on lrc.red and LRCLIB, two open lyrics databases, by title, artist, album and length. Many songs are timed word by word; for the rest it spreads each line’s words over the line’s timing. If a song has no lyrics, a small ♪ shows and it stays out of the way.
Spotify’s web player and music videos
Playing Spotify in a browser works too: Peekabop treats it like any other browser playback. Spotify’s video clips, which don’t always start where the song does, are handled by the same video timing that lines up YouTube lyrics.
Price
Peekabop is €9.99, paid once, with a 7-day free trial that needs no account or card. It runs on macOS 15 or later.