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?
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.