Look closely at a Dutch Melrose release and you will usually find it three times: the original, the sped-up version, and the slowed and reverbed version. RUNRUNRUN has them. PRETTY PLEASE, RUSH, FORGET YOU, KARMA, TAKE ME and DIRTY LITTLE FIEND have them. This is not indecision. It is strategy.
Why it works
TikTok trends do not wait for official audio. Users speed songs up for energy or slow them down for mood, and those unofficial edits rack up millions of plays that pay the artist nothing. Releasing official sped-up and slowed versions captures that demand: every edit-driven trend now streams back to his own label. The receipts are real: the sped-up RUNRUNRUN alone has pulled nearly 16 million Spotify streams on top of the original’s 226 million.
He was early
He put out a dedicated Slowed + Reverb, Pt. 1 release back in October 2021, before the format became an industry-wide reflex. That is the pattern with him: spot where TikTok-native listening is going, then build the catalog to meet it, the same instinct that made him one of the sharpest self-marketers in independent music.
Fans were going to remix him anyway. He just made sure it counted.
The mood economy
The two formats serve opposite audiences of the same song. Sped-up is for the trend side of TikTok, higher energy, faster cuts, dance and meme edits. Slowed and reverbed is for the feelings side, the late-night, lyrics-on-screen, dark-romance-edit side, which for an artist whose catalog runs on heartbreak is arguably the home crowd. One recording, tuned to both moods, tripling its surface area on the platform that decides what blows up.
The bigger lesson
Major labels discovered sped-up versions as a growth hack around 2023. An independent artist in Los Angeles was already shipping them as standard practice, one more data point for why his fully-owned catalog has crossed 750 million streams without a major label anywhere in the credits.