Spotify plots to introduce controversial new feature
All it takes is a quick glance at TikTok for a few minutes to notice that a large majority of songs on the platform have been manipulated. Sped-up versions of popular songs go viral, with many people only consuming these fan-edited tracks as opposed to the artist’s original release.
Elsewhere, people often make AI-generated covers of popular songs, such as the late Jeff Buckley singing Lana Del Rey numbers or Del Rey singing Mitski tracks. In fact, an AI imagining of Del Rey performing Mitski’s single ‘My Love Mine All Mine’ went particularly viral on TikTok last year. Additionally, many people who used the sound were unaware they were listening to a fake piece of music.
The popularity of these modified songs has resulted in many fraudulent tracks appearing on Spotify. Users upload sped-up or alternative versions of hits that they’ve made themselves, earning revenue for a piece of music they’ve simply changed the tempo of.
Many users also upload these modified songs via podcast episodes, trying to ensure that Spotify doesn’t take them down. The issue is that countless artists are having their tracks streamed without receiving any revenue.
Some artists have tried to combat this by uploading sped-up versions of their songs, which have gone viral on TikTok, themselves. Del Rey did this in 2022 and 2023 when she released sped-up remixes of ‘Summertime Sadness’ and ‘Say Yes To Heaven’. The former alone has racked up a whopping 64,703,756 million streams.
However, according to The Wall Street Journal, Spotify is developing an idea to let users edit songs within the app, with the original artists still receiving revenue when these modified tracks are streamed. Thus, instead of relying on fraudulent uploads of sped-up songs, users can change the speed of a track themselves and save this version to a special collection in their account.
These manipulated versions will not be able to be shared outside of the app, although other Spotify users can access sped-up songs in public playlists.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that these features would be made available to Spotify users with a regular subscription, while more complex DJ functions could possibly be regelated to a more expensive option.
There is no set date for the streaming service to roll out these changes, but they should hopefully allow artists to take back more control of their own work as they increasingly lose ownership in the age of TikTok and Instagram Reels.
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