Beyoncé dropped her seventh solo studio album at the end of July, and it quickly became a smash with both critics and fans alike.
But since then, fans are sure the singer has changed some things including lyrics, background vocals and even pauses between songs. Others claimed the album sounded different between various music streaming platforms.
Some fans theorized it could be a way for Beyoncé to keep them hooked by introducing enough subtle changes that people would hear something new every time they listened.
While others pointed to the “Partition” singer’s self-confessed perfectionism, suggesting she kept tweaking the album until she was 100 percent happy with it.
However, Beyoncé had already said Renaissance was “a place to be free of perfectionism and overthinking,” in an Instagram statement when the album was released.
“MY FAVORITE SONGS KEEP CHANGING EVERY LISTEN,” wrote one fan on Twitter.
Another added: “I fully believe the conspiracy theory that Beyoncé keeps changing parts of the songs on Renaissance (therefore making it addictive like crack) because Move on Spotify is not the same as the one on Apple Music.”
And a third commented: “So, I just seen a TikTok that confirmed my suspicion. Beyonce is changing the songs on Renaissance!!! Alien superstar and Heated hot new vocals in it ! Cause that ‘uncle Johnny and tip tip’ wasn’t there last week and Alien Superstar beats is different.”
The theory gained traction on TikTok, with Nashville songwriter Melody Walker explaining in a video why she believed the conspiracy theory could be true.
“The album is never the same y’all,” she said after stitching a video from fellow creator The Steven Steven, who also talked about the theory.
“I’ve never wanted a music conspiracy theory to be true more than I want this one to be true. Obviously, the listen counts wouldn’t change, and the album keeps unfolding and sounding different to us because it literally is different.”
Walker explained a feat like this would not be possible for indie artists, but someone with Beyoncé’s money and influence could get away with it.
“But I don’t know if I put it past Beyoncé and her team, the major labels own huge stakes in Spotify,” she said.
Beyoncé’s husband, Jay-Z, also owned a majority stake in streaming service Tidal until he sold it to former Twitter boss, Jack Dorsey, in 2021.
“Maybe they actually can do this. We know that there are people selling NFTs of music are already selling different mixes and remixes. And with machine learning and AI, we can probably create music that keeps evolving,” Walker theorized.
“There are some tech startups that are already looking at this.”
Walker then put it to her followers if it was possible that Beyoncé was “pulling a bait and switch” on her fans and whether this would be “the future of music” to get people to listen to music in “timely fashion because it [the music] will never be the same again.”
“Or is it because hearing is perception? We naturally perceive different things in music as we become more familiar with it,” Walker concluded.
Newsweek has reached out to Beyoncé for comment.
Beyoncé has made some well documented changes to the album shortly following its release after two of the songs courted controversy.
She removed an ableist slur from the song “Heated” which heard her use an offensive term derived from the disability “spastic cerebral palsy,” a disability that affects movement and coordination.
In many countries the word “s**z” is seen as an ableist slur, but in the U.S., it was used as a slang verb to mean losing control.
“The word, not used intentionally in a harmful way, will be replaced,” Beyoncé’s team said in a statement to Variety at the time.
A few days after the album’s release, Beyoncé also removed an interpolation of the song “Milkshake” after its original artist, Kelis, complained on Instagram.
An interpolation is when an artist re-records a part from another song to add to one of their own tracks.
Kelis accused the star of “theft” for using an interpolation from her 2003 song in the Renaissance track called “Energy.”
In “Energy” Beyoncé sang a variation of the iconic “La-la, la-la, la” from “Milkshake,” but it has since been removed.
Kelis slammed the singer for not giving her a credit or even a notification about the interpolation.
But Kelis was not credited as a songwriter on her breakout hit, which featured Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo—the Neptunes—credited as its writers.