remixes
Nick Ditri’s career as a dance music producer got a big boost when Tiesto used a 2013 bootleg remix of Avicii’s “Silhouettes” by his duo, Disco Fries. But like countless other unauthorized remixes, “Silhouettes” isn’t found on most of the popular streaming platforms. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t live anywhere outside of YouTube when Tiesto played it,” Ditri tells Billboard.
That could soon change. Eleven years later, Ditri is trying to give commercial legitimacy to tracks in that commercial gray area. He is a managing partner of ClearBeats, a startup that enables derivative works — remixes, interpolations, mashups and alternate versions — to become properly licensed tracks. ClearBeats’ other managing partner, Bob Barbiere, is a former Dubset executive and veteran in digital technology and rights clearances. Ditri and Barbiere created the company with Suzanne Coffman and Yolanda Ferraloro of veteran music sync company Music Rightz.
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Digital platforms are awash in unauthorized derivative works because “it’s the easiest way to get your foot in the door, especially in dance music and in hip hop,” says Ditri. In a perfect world, those tracks would be licensed for distribution to digital platforms or synchronizations in TV shows, advertisements or movies. “But the problem is it usually ends at SoundCloud where it might get muted or pulled down,” he says. “[Or] it ends at YouTube or a DJ pool.”
ClearBeats wants to address what Barbiere calls the “90/90 irony.” He estimates that 90% of artists who create derivative works want publicity and promotion, not the original artist’s rights or royalties. Additionally, 90% of rights owners would rather make money from a derivative work than take it down from a digital platform. But because the proper infrastructure doesn’t exist, Barbiere estimates that less than 5%, and maybe as little as 1%, of derivative works have proper attribution and are earning money for rights holders.
“Why shouldn’t 90% of that content live in an ecosystem where everybody can distribute into it, consume it, be properly attributed to it, and royalties paid downstream?” asks Barbiere.
The status quo not only prevents original recordings’ ability to generate revenue from derivative uses, but it also limits creators’ ability to build their careers, says Ditri. “If [producers] built a playlist network of five amazing Spotify playlists or Apple music playlists, and that’s their main source of promo and then they go and do a bootleg, that bootleg’s only gonna live wherever they posted — which is not going to be Spotify. So, they can’t even tap into their own networks. And it’s limited on Instagram and other socials as well.”
Currently, ClearBeats is helping labels, distributors and artists with bespoke licenses, working on a few long-term, strategic projects and helping companies identify and collect unpaid or suspended royalties. Barbiere says he has been contacted by distributors who want to help clients get licenses for tracks that incorporate samples as well as streaming platforms that want to license music catalogs to allow their users to create derivative works. A subscription-based registry for licensors and licensees is expected to roll out at the end of 2024 into 2025.
As for Ditri, co-founding ClearBeats provides him an opportunity give Disco Fries’ derivative works like “Silhouettes” a life outside of YouTube. “I’m thankful for the video clip,” he says, “but wouldn’t it be wonderful if this had existed back then?”
In the TikTok era, homemade remixes of songs — typically single tracks that have been sped up or slowed down, or two tracks mashed together — have become ever more popular. Increasingly, they are driving viral trends on the platform and garnering streams off of it.
Just how popular? In April, Larry Mills, senior vp of sales at the digital rights tech company Pex, wrote that Pex’s tech found “hundreds of millions of modified audio tracks distributed from July 2021 to March 2023,” which appeared on TikTok, SoundCloud, Audiomack, YouTube, Instagram and more.
On Wednesday (Nov. 1), Mills shared the results of a new Pex analysis — expanded to include streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, and Tidal — estimating that “at least 1% of all songs on [streaming platforms] are modified audio.”
“We’re talking more than 1 million unlicensed, manipulated songs that are diverting revenue away from rightsholders this very minute,” Mills wrote, pointing to homemade re-works of tracks by Halsey or One Republic that have amassed millions of plays. “These can generate millions in cumulative revenue for the uploaders instead of the correct rightsholders.”
Labels try to execute a tricky balancing act with user-generated remixes. They usually strike down the most popular unauthorized reworks on streaming services and move to release their own official versions in an attempt to pull those plays in-house. But they also find ways to encourage fan remixing, because it remains an effective form of music marketing at a time when most promotional strategies have proved toothless. “Rights holders understand that this process is inevitable, and it’s one of the best ways to bring new life to tracks,” Meng Ru Kuok, CEO of music technology company BandLab, said to Billboard earlier this year.
Mills argues that the industry needs a better system for tracking user-generated remixes and making sure royalties are going into the right pockets. “While these hyper-speed remixes may make songs go viral,” he wrote in April, “they’re also capable of diverting royalty payments away from rights holders and into the hands of other creators.”
Since Pex sells technology for identifying all this modified audio, it’s not exactly an unbiased party. But it’s notable that streaming services and distributors don’t have the best track record when it comes to keeping unauthorized content of any kind off their platforms.
It hasn’t been unusual to find leaked songs — especially from rappers with impassioned fan bases like Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert — on Spotify, where leaked tracks can often be found climbing the viral chart, or TikTok. An unreleased Pink Pantheress song sampling Michael Jackson’s classic “Off the Wall” is currently hiding in plain sight on Spotify, masquerading as a podcast.
“Historically, streaming services don’t have an economic incentive to actually care about that,” Deezer CEO Jeronimo Folgueira told Billboard earlier this year. “We don’t care whether you listen to the original Drake, fake Drake, or a recording of the rain. We just want you to pay $10.99.” Folgueira called that incentive structure “actually a bad thing for the industry.”
In addition, many of the distribution companies that act as middlemen between artists and labels and the streaming services operate on a volume model — the more content they upload, the more money they make — which means it’s not in their financial interest to look closely at what they send along to streaming services.
However, the drive to improve this system has taken on new urgency this year. Rights holders and streaming services are going back and forth over how streaming payments should work and whether “an Ed Sheeran stream is worth exactly the same as a stream of rain falling on the roof,” as Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl told financial analysts in May. As the industry starts to move to a system where all streams are no longer created equal, it becomes increasingly important to know exactly what’s on these platforms so it can sort different streams into different buckets.
In addition, the advance of artificial intelligence-driven technology has allowed for easily accessible and accurate-sounding voice-cloning, which has alarmed some executives and artists in a way that sped-up remixes have not. “In our conversations with the labels, we heard that some artists are really pissed about this stuff,” says Geraldo Ramos, co-founder/CEO of the music-tech company Moises. “They’re calling their label to say, ‘Hey, it isn’t acceptable, my voice is everywhere.’”
This presents new challenges, but also perhaps means new opportunities for digital fingerprint technology companies, whether that’s stalwarts like Audible Magic or newer players like Pex. “With AI, just think how much the creation of derivative works is going to exponentially grow — how many covers are going to get created, how many remixes are gonna get created,” Audible Magic CEO Kuni Takahashi told Billboard this summer. “The scale of what we’re trying to identify and the pace of change is going to keep getting faster.”
Last fall, the 25-year-old English singer Raye was on the hunt for her first U.S. hit after several years of U.K. chart success. Initially, the loping hip-hop soul single “Escapism” seemed to bring her no closer. After the first week, streams of the track started to fall, according to Luminate. But in mid-November, its trajectory dramatically reversed, leaping from 185,000 streams one week to 500,000 the next to over 6 million two weeks later. “Escapism” went on to peak at No. 22 on the Billboard Hot 100.
What happened? The burgeoning popularity of a homemade sped-up remix of “Escapism” that captivated TikTok users, spurring them to incorporate it into their videos and driving streams of the original. Raye’s label, Human Re Sources, responded by releasing an official uptempo rework of the single that has over 114 million streams on Spotify alone.
“I wish that I could sit here and say, ‘We were in our marketing meeting, we decided that we were going to do a sped-up version of this particular spot in the song, and that’s going to ignite all the rest of it,’ ” says J. Erving, a longtime music manager, founder of the artist services and distribution company Human Re Sources, and executive vp of creative development at Sony Music Entertainment. “The kids are taking control of the songs, and they’re determining what part of the record is sticky and what version of it is sticky.”
Those “sticky” versions — often just sped up or slowed down, or a pair of tracks mashed together — can spark streams. “These remixes can really create careers and reignite careers,” Universal Music Group vp of A&R strategy Nima Nasseri says. “They’re great mechanisms for growth. Every label is putting them out,” often releasing official versions of the remixes that trend on short-form video platforms.
Sped-up remixes also spurred recent chart surges for Miguel’s “Sure Thing” (actually a resurge, as it first charted over a decade ago), The Weeknd’s “Die for You,” Lady Gaga’s “Bloody Mary,” and Mariah Carey’s “It’s a Wrap,” as well as boosting streams for tracks like Lizzy McAlpine‘s “Ceilings.”
Remixes — extended for club play, shortened and punched up for radio — are nothing new. And listeners taking control has been a hallmark of the shift to digital, starting with YouTube fan covers in the 2000s and progressing in the streaming era to fan response helping labels determine what tracks to focus on for promotion.
The difference today is the extent to which power has shifted to social media users. The process, says Erving, is no longer about label executives and managers deciding “this is our single, insert remix producer here, add rapper here, this is going to be the thing — those days are over.” In fact, according to a major-label A&R executive, “it’s not about the recording anymore. It’s about what you’re offering the user base to say, ‘Hey, you’re an intelligent consumer. Here are the stems [individual audio components] for our songs. Do what you want to it.’”
“Is anything in its final form now?” one major-label marketing executive asks. “Or are we just putting out clay for fans to mold?”
Part of this change is technological — it has never been simpler to manipulate audio. “These [remixes] are being made easily by fans in real time on their computer or phones,” says RCA Records COO John Fleckenstein.
Many in the music industry believe this remixing activity is also part of a generational shift. “Gen Z in particular has been raised online alongside meme culture,” says Scott Plagenhoef, global head of music programming at Apple Music. “They’re accustomed to content that is repeated but manipulated, and music is no different.”
While it’s common to encounter both sped-up and slowed-down remixes on short-form video platforms, Plagenhoef says “sped-up remixes seem considerably more popular and prevalent than slowed-down ones” at the moment. “Sped-up songs allow for more of a track to be heard within the time constraints of a TikTok video and mirror the pace at which users consume content online,” he adds. Increasing tempo can also “make the songs better — it brings out a different emotion,” according to Josh “Bru” Brubaker, a TikToker (4.5 million followers) and radio personality for Audacy.
Many remixes don’t replace or distract fans from the original track — they draw attention to it. “From a discovery standpoint, we see a large amount of referral traffic make its way back to original tracks from remixes,” says Roneil Rumburg, co-founder/CEO of Audius, a blockchain-based streaming service. For example, the original of Raye’s “Escapism” (304 million streams) is significantly out-streaming its sped-up remix on Spotify.
Since discovery is increasingly difficult to engineer in a time of content overload, the music industry is encouraging fan experimentation with songs and aiding the creation of remixes. “There’s a whole community of TikTok DJs solely making these sounds to try to make them go viral because you get so much exposure,” Brubaker says. Labels and marketers say they sometimes pay these DJs anywhere from a few hundred dollars to $20,000 to remix and post songs.
Labels have also worked to get officially released sped-up remixes visibility on streaming services. UMG started the Spotify account Speed Radio to highlight its sped-up tracks, according to Nasseri; it has more than 9 million monthly listeners. Another account, sped up nightcore, does the same for Warner Music Group releases. (A WMG representative did not respond to requests for comment on this account.) “Anytime we get one of these remixes that has traction, we tag it with ‘Speed Radio,’ and it just amplifies the growth,” says Nasseri. “That’s a very valuable tool for artists to use.”
The streaming services have created playlists for these remixes as well. Spotify’s Sped Up Songs, launched last June, now has over 1 million followers. Apple Music recently unveiled Viral Remixed. “Over the past year, the DSP partners have been really helpful,” Nasseri says. “Casey Compernolle at Apple and Lizzy Szabo at Spotify are people we work with closely who have a great understanding of the remix space.”
Even as these remixes have helped create hits, not every artist wants to participate in this economy. “I completely respect if an artist chooses not to release a sped-up version if it doesn’t suit the song,” says Ian Quay, co-manager of Cults, who have a popular sped-up version of their song “Gilded Lily.”
But much of the stigma around tempo-shifted remixes seems to be fading. “Two years ago, I’d say 5% or 10% of artists were receptive to this,” Nasseri estimates. “Now it’s probably about 70%.” Meng Ru Kuok, CEO of music technology company BandLab, adds, “rights holders understand that this process is inevitable, and it’s one of the best ways to bring new life to tracks.”
While sped-up and slowed-down versions run wild on TikTok, they haven’t penetrated the mainstream — yet. “It still feels more specific to the short-form platforms right now than ‘I heard a great sped-up version at the club last night,’ ” says Fleckenstein.
But this could change. The rock duo Cafuné broke out with “Tek It”; the sped-up version now has more Spotify streams (143 million) than the original (137 million). Fleckenstein points to young RCA act Ari Abdul, who has enjoyed streaming success with the synthwave single “Babydoll.” “Sometimes the sped-up version is actually outperforming the original,” he says.
Will these tempo-shifted remixes eventually reach all the way to radio? “If it’s good enough,” Fleckenstein adds, “you never know.”
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