Report: Spotify Developing Editing Tools For Subscribers

The Spotify is developing tools that would allow subscribers to speed up, mash up and otherwise edit songs from their favorite artists, according to The Wall Street Journal citing people familiar with the discussions. It is a bet on the future of music consumption that Spotify hopes will deepen user engagement and appeal to young users, while generating new revenue for artists. 

Fans—particularly people in their teens and 20s—regularly manipulate songs for social media, adding their own flair and then splicing the catchiest snippets into viral dance challenges, tutorials and memes. But artists and labels don’t often get paid for those altered versions of their songs, which are hard to track and are often distributed on a range of platforms including TikTok and Instagram Reels.

Spotify’s exploration of the new tools spotlights a scramble among music and tech executives to ensure artists and labels continue to make money even as the way fans consume music evolves. Rights holders—labels, publishers and artists—would be compensated when fans stream modified versions of their music on Spotify, the people said. 

Under the plans Spotify is discussing, the new tools could function as a type of playback feature, with users deciding, for example, at which speed they want to listen to a song. The users could potentially then save their preferred versions to virtual collections for repeat listening. 

The effort is an opportunity for Spotify to seize listening time that it has so far ceded to social platforms such as TikTok. On TikTok, 38% of songs had their speeds or pitches modified in 2023, up from 25% in 2022, according to the content identification technology and data firm Pex.