[Waterluvian]

If this is why… why not just release all the individual layers?

I’ve always wondered how remixes come to be. Some sound muddy and obviously full of muted layers. But others sound like they had access to the individual tracks.

[thrtythreeforty]

"All the individual layers" are called "stems" and artists that want to explicitly encourage remixes of their work will release stems. (Of course, you still pay royalties if you use them.)

You can also create your own stems, typically of usable but not perfect quality, using AI track separation software like demucs. ("Demux," get it?) I've used them to censor a track, or to isolate just percussion and piano, for example.

[jonhohle]

Royalties aside, in this Creative Commons, remix/mashup heavy inline world, why aren’t bass releasing multi tracks? A decade ago remix.nin.com provided multitracks and Garage Band and Ableton projects to remix and upload. Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D and Ghosts had the same on CD-ROM (Ghosts was Creative Commons which led to 34 Ghosts IV being sampled and later included in Old Town Road). The Slip stems were released publicly under CC as well. People went further and pulled tracks from Rock Band.

Are there other big bands that have done this? While not getting down to raw assets, home movies have had special features describing filmmaking techniques since the 80s. I’d guess at least 10% of current home video releases come with some type of commentary, featurette, or the like. Why is this so much less common in the music industry?

[input_sh]

It's a common thing in the electronic music industry to release stems as a part of a remix contest. Dozens of remixes get uploaded to Soundcloud, the authors of the original track cherrypick a couple of them, package them into a "(Remixes)" EP and release it on their label.

It's like an initiation step for bedroom producers. You build up your reputation by having a couple of remixes released by an actual label, your remix gets played by DJs associated with that label, you start to develop relationships with the industry people in the process... It's an entire ecosystem based around free stems.

This on the other hand is aimed at DJs who use vinyls to layer on top of different drums, but it's the same principle. They want their tracks to be sampleable to other artists.

[Waterluvian]

Thanks for the name!

[qingcharles]

Some artists do. Moby used to do this. You can see it on this old CD single where he included a track with all the "parts" on it which was just the individual samples:

https://www.discogs.com/release/27604-Moby-Feeling-So-Real-R...

I used to sample these and put them in a MOD tracker and make my own remixes that way in the early 90s.