As reported by MusicTech, the move makes even more sense as this was previously a feature by Musicxmatch who currently power lyrics for Spotify, but they removed the vocal stem feature recently. The ability to affect stems in real-time became a very popular feature when Deezer released their open-source stem separation algorithm Spleeter back in late 2019. It led to a bunch of software and websites that specialise in real-time stem separation using AI, including DJ software Algoriddim djay and VirtualDJ. The karaoke feature was also teased in Sept last year when a prominent engineer tweeted it.
The feature isn’t official yet – it was posted on the TrueSpotify Reddit – but it will be interesting to see if and when the feature lands, and what other stem separation tools could appear on streaming platforms in the future.
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