It’s already the biggest music streaming service in the world, but if “people familiar with the discussions” are to be believed, Spotify is currently working on tools that will enable you to “speed up, mash-up and otherwise edit songs” from within its own platform. Built-in remixing tools, in other words.
This is the view of The Wall Street Journal, which suggests that Spotify hopes to keep people on its platform rather than have them head off to TikTok, the ‘sped-up songs’ heartland. It suggests that users will be able to show off their edits to friends on Spotify, but that they won’t be shareable to social media platforms.
It’s now common practice for an artist to release multiple versions of a new song - it’s not uncommon for big hits to be available in original, sped-up, instrumental and acapella formats - as stars seek to maximise their streaming revenue. Whether Spotify’s predicted ‘remixing’ tools would be included in the price of a standard subscription or lumped in as part of a new premium tier remains to be seen.
While there may well be a market for these features, we suspect that what a lot of users would really like to see implemented in Spotify is the ability to mix between tracks, DJ-style (there are currently crossfade and automix options, but these are fairly limited). The platform used to be compatible with the likes of Algoriddim’s djay and Serato’s sadly discontinued Pyro, but Spotify removed access to its catalogue by third-party apps in 2020.
