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?
In the past, these were just called remixes and were really common to find on b-sides of singles or deluxe editions of albums.
The two artists to really push it in the mainstream that I can think of, ironically, are Kanye West and Taylor Swif. Two of the most popular artists of the past few decades have made a big showing of a “living album,” one that exists digitally, centrally, and whose tracks can be changed really at anytime. I think that’s where most of the smaller artists you see putting out alternate versions of their songs post-release have gotten their inspiration from