What was the first remix ever

The entire industry would actually follow, but everyone knew Puffy was the pioneer. He wouldn't let anyone forget about it, either.

Revitalizing singles with new production or features became the wave of repurposing music. Nothing in the music industry ever does. A change occurred during the mids, though, when the remix ceased to be an art form that produced new instrumentation. In a interview with SoulCulture , Just Blaze provided insight into what inspired such a small but noticeable change. By keeping the production untouched, both the single and the remix would account for the same amount of spins.

Preferring the remix over the original no longer mattered, as Nielsen would judge them as a single entity. A new beat suddenly meant lower spin totals, not ideal for measuring a song's success.

Puff was a banger guy, he prided himself on having the hottest hit, but the remix format he helped to popularize was killed because it made tracing hits more difficult. When the remix format changed, the focus was no longer on crafting production that could push a single into new spaces but finding the right feature to push the music further.

He became a fine example of how the remix spectacle could be turned into a sensation due to an unlikely visitor; there was no way to predict what song he would arrive on and that only added to what made each appearance monumental. But how did remixes end up conquering rock, too? The shift from cassettes to CDs put the single in an awkward situation. It was considerably cheaper to produce a vinyl disc or cassette with less information on it, and so a single with an a-side song and a b-side song worked logically with the format.

CDs, though, cost the same amount to produce whether they contained 80 minutes or 80 seconds of music. At this point, it became almost irresistible to start putting more and more tracks on CD singles. If the label could provide more songs with relatively little additional production cost, then they could justify charging more for the CDs. The answer was remixes. The result was that remixes, instead of being initiated by a producer drawn to a particular track, were getting done whether or not they were a good idea, just to say that such a remix existed.

An apocryphal story has it that a courier arrived to pick up a commissioned remix from Richard D. James of Aphex Twin fame, and James, having forgotten to do it, simply grabbed a random track off of his shelf. But why dance remixes? The traditional filler material for rock bands, after all, was the live album, and indeed live versions of existing songs sometimes ended up on maxi-singles too.

At the time, though, there was something much cooler about electronic music. What matters is how many people discovered that band through the remix. Watch Wheezy in the Remix Lab. Aeroplane, for example, accepts that he's better known for his remixes than for his own creations. On Spotify, my remix has maybe 10 times more streams than the original. Either way round, it is only a positive thing.

The problem with remixes, though, is that they can be just a cynical afterthought. Undeterred, Aeroplane decided to leak the track to a blog and it became a sleeper hit. After leaving a voicemail and an apology for Aeroplane, they released the remix — and it became much better known than the original.

Not that he earned any serious money for it. Meet Gunner Stahl, the "only hip-hop cameraman living like a rapper" We caught up with Atlanta photographer Stahl at …. Skream is similarly relaxed about the financial remuneration he got for his In For The Kill remix. Even four or five years later, it was the music for Versace and Armani, the Judge Dredd theme tune.

People used to expect me to be annoyed, but the fee was nothing. And we will find it not in performanced by DJ Kool Herc, but in performances that he may have attended in his childhood growing up in Jamaica.

His willingness to leave tradition at the door and experiment on the turntable may have been inspired by the Jamaican dance hall DJs he observed in his youth. Doing this would allow them to adapt different songs to suit the varied tastes of Jamaican audiences.

Because many producers at the time owned the multitrack masters of their recordings, they were able to create complex new mixes of any songs they had produced. Because of the sheer amount of remixed and re-engineered music coming out of Jamaica at this time, it is impossible to pinpoint exactly which release was the first ever remix, but the tradition dates back to at least the late s, if not earlier.

There are, of course, competing narratives to this one on the origins of the remix.