In March, a Spotify account named Lucky Socks uploaded an accelerated version of Mark Ambor's “Belong Together” to the platform. More than six weeks later, this cute take on the folksy original still garners about 350,000 streams a day, and various high-speed versions of “Belong Together” have been used in more than 400,000 TikTok videos to date.
This is just the latest sign that accelerated remixes — often done at home by amateurs — are driving both music discovery and streaming activity. “A large percentage of the population engages with music that way,” he says Ben Klein, president of Ambor's label, Hundred Days Records. “If you're an audio platform, you have to start letting people tap into that.”
That's exactly what platforms do. In late 2023, streaming service Audiomack quietly released Audiomod, a new set of tools that let users tinker with tracks by changing the tempo, tweaking the pitch, or wrapping them in reverb. In March, Hook announced that it had raised $3.5 million to further develop a platform that will help artists “monetize using fan-generated remixes on social media.” And in April, The Wall Street Journal reported that Spotify plans to introduce its own remixing tools.
These initiatives signal a growing realization that user remixes cannot be avoided – kids can easily do them on their phones. Since almost all of these remixes are unauthorized, labels and publishers stand to gain if fans make and listen to remixes on streaming platforms, where they can be paid for like a regular track. (“The next big front line will be how we get paid for UGC,” Warner Chappell CEO/Co-Chairman Guy Moot he said recently Advertising signnoting “the real challenge” of tracking down all “those really rough accelerated versions”.)
And platforms can also benefit if new audio manipulation tools increase engagement or even attract additional users. “We think it might be a way to encourage more users to sign up,” says Audiomack co-founder Dave Macley.
Audiomack Quarterly Manipulated Song Uploads
Courtesy of Audiomack
Creating new remixing possibilities will require the music industry to get comfortable with more flexible licensing deals that legitimize what was previously a black market activity — for fans, making a remix at home without a license is fun. for tags, it's technically copyright infringement. It remains unclear how artists will feel about labels endorsing random remixes of their work, and whether listeners will connect with these homemade remixes when they're not connected to addictive TikTok videos or Instagram Reels.
While remixes and user edits aren't a new phenomenon, there's a sense in the industry that this behavior — recklessly speeding up a song or distorting a track — is especially beloved by a new generation that sees changing music as way of expressing admiration. Audiomack found that modders, who modify more than 100 songs a month, are 50% more likely to be under the age of 20 than the average user of the platform.
“Younger users want to have some control over the sound themselves: 'Hey, what if we tweaked it a little bit?' he says himself. Tyler Blatchleyco-founder of the Black 17 Media label.
As a result, artists and record companies often encourage fan remixing because it can be an effective promotional tool. At the same time, they often remove unauthorized dubs they find on major streaming services because those divert money from artists' pockets. Some acts release their own official sped-up or delayed versions to try to capitalize on the form's popularity. (Audiomack data shows that this trend actually accelerated in late 2022.)
For the music industry, this patchwork system remains unsatisfactory. “There's little visibility into what people are doing with the music, artists don't get to play a role in how their fans engage, and they often don't get paid for [the] consumption” of unofficial remixes, he says Gaurav Sharmathe CEO of Hook.
The Hook app, which recently launched a private beta, offers a more controlled environment for mixing activity, where users can select pre-cleaned songs to manipulate and mash. If a fan creates a new version they love — and, crucially, the rights holders have given permission — they'll theoretically be allowed to export that alternative to other platforms when the app goes public later this year. In other words, a fully licensed and trackable remix or mash-up could be created on Hook and then go viral on a short-form video platform or in a video game.
While Audiomod allows users to play with beat, distortion and more, they can't mix one song with another or export their favorite remix to other platforms. However, they can share their preferred settings with friends so that friends can easily play their favorite mix. Plays of a modified version of a song on Audiomack will be paid the same as plays of official recordings.
Audiomack asked Merlin – the global digital licensing company for the independent music industry – to 'sign up for this', says co-founder Dave Macley. “We are in discussions with the gentlemen.”
For now, Spotify seems to mostly have a plan for building mixing tools in the future. (A spokesman for the service declined to comment.) The company has been interested in finding ways to let users “play and manipulate music” for years in environments like a DJ set, according to a former executive. Additionally, Spotify tries to capture a lot of creator engagement moments because TikTok is much more of an engagement platform.
While The Wall Street Journal reported that Spotify has yet to strike licensing deals for remixing tools, the former executive believes labels “will be all-in for anything that raises the stakes and gets them a bigger share of the royalty pool.”
And labels seem more open to sanctioning users' manipulation of their sound. In December, for example, the video game Fortnite introduced a new music experience called “Jam Stage,” which lets players play music with their friends — but each person can jam to a different song, creating a weird, cacophonous mash. -up. in real (virtual) time.
The former Spotify executive believes the real obstacle to creating official remixing tools will come from artists protecting their work. “What is [labels] allowed to do in their contracts with artists and how will the artists feel about it?' he asks.
At Audiomack, Macli says “we respect an artist's decision if they don't want to be a part of it [allowing users to remix their songs]. But I think you're kind of fighting the tide.”
Once platforms and labels settle licensing, a big question remains: Will users make and listen to remixes on streaming services without the lure of an exciting visual trend or the potential to go viral?
Audiomack users already seem to like sending the tracks they upload or change in other ways. “Over 9% of all shares on the platform are song modifications,” according to Macli.
While Klein agrees that “there's an appetite for accelerated event listening,” he believes “there's a much smaller use case in that context.” “Accelerated sounds are really permeating audiovisual platforms” – especially TikTok, which has had a fraught relationship with the music industry lately.
Still, says Macli, “the industry is going to have to lean into it one way or another. They should lean into this as a technology problem for DSPs to solve.”
