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?
It’s a remix. They used to be called b-side songs. 19-2000 by gorillas is a good example. I guess with the loss of physical media and everyone streaming, it’s just easier and probably nets more streams by just releasing b-sides a few weeks after the initial release?
Yeah, this was the norm for musicians for most of human history, before the introduction of mass-reproduced recordings in the early 20th century (and music copyrights in the 18th). Musicians were continually re-working all their compositions, meeting new collaborators and mixing up their repertoires, etc.