Spotify has had another idea. Early next year, for a few dollars more a month, you’ll be able to have a machine rework a song you love: a ballad turned into a club track, one star’s voice dropped onto another star’s song. Universal has signed. So have Merlin and Believe. Olivia Rodrigo needed three words: “I would never.”
So the pitch has gone to the older crowd. At an investor conference in September, one of Spotify’s chief executives put it to artists from the eighties and nineties like this: you used to hope someone would cover your song; now your fans can remix it, and you’ll take a bigger share of the pool.
How much bigger? They won’t say. What they will say is that investors can expect mid-teens growth every year to 2030. One number gets a press release. The other gets a shrug.
Look at the shape of the offer. You wrote the song. A company that already decides who gets heard, and what a play is worth, now wants to rent your voice to strangers, take its cut first and call your share a favour. That isn’t a partnership. It’s a landlord raising the rent and calling it an upgrade.
And who is it for? Who spends their evening, and their money, putting one pop star’s head on another’s song? Nobody who loves music. Somebody with a phone and something to post.
Different founders, same instinct: find something human, take it apart, sell it back.
We’ve seen this film. Facebook promised to bring the world closer together and turned friendship into a feed. Now Spotify promises to bring fans closer to artists and turns songs into templates. Different founders, same instinct: find something human, take it apart, sell it back.
That’s the creepy part. Not the software. The certainty, from people who sell music by the month, that a song is just content waiting to be improved.
Twenty years ago the streamers rescued the record business from piracy. They’ve been collecting on that favour ever since. It’s time somebody called it in.
A song was finished the moment it was played well. It doesn’t need their help.
Roc Gardner
ESCAPE®, Pioneertown
Source: Financial Times, “Spotify aims to launch AI music remix service early next year”, October 2026. ft.com