I don’t normally listen to much pop music, so I know I’m a bit late to the party on this one. But I’ve noticed that in modern pop music, artists will sometimes release a “normal” version of a song, then a few weeks later they’ll release the same song again, except one of the verses is replaced with a feature. It’s not a remix, it’s just the same song but with another artist singing some different lyrics.
Is there a name for this type of song? How long has this been going on? When was this trend started?
Remixes have been around for a while. However, the current trend is thought to have been started with Lil Nas X with “Old Town Road”.
Part of what made that song blow up was tons of remixes across different genres of music, which all counted as the same song when it came to the charts. This allowed for the song to be tweaked to different musical tastes while still giving the appearance of a mainstream hit.
So now, if you are a musician who wants to inflate their numbers, you can plan out remixes to be released at different times.
“Old Town Road” is a great mention, I hadn’t even thought of that when I wrote my parent comment