I recently spent three minutes and forty-two seconds of my life that I will never get back listening to DJ Khaled – I Believe (from Disney’s A WRINKLE IN TIME) ft. Demi Lovato on YouTube. (In my defense, it autoplayed.)
I admit I totally don’t get the appeal of either artist, especially DJ Khaled–and not because of some non-existent aversion to rap either. But de gustibus non est disputandum and all that. So my question is not why does this basically uninteresting song have more than 1.6 million views — autoplay, right? or maybe movie tie-in — but rather, how can this possibly be called a song by DJ Khaled featuring Demi Lovato, when by my very rough count (I will not make myself play it again) he supplies the audio for less than 15 seconds and appears on the video doing his arm-wavy thing for at most a little more than that.
She does all the work, it’s his song with her ‘guest’ vocal?
By the way, Chloe x Halle’s Warrior from the same soundtrack, while in no way ground-breaking, is much nicer and the video also better-looking:
Yet as of this writing it has only under 400K views, less than a quarter of the other one.
There is plenty of precedents for this…Kind of like an associate writing an article and the partner thanking him for his contribution in a footnote.