Fade (Alan Walker instrumental)
"Fade" is an instrumental electro house track produced by Norwegian producer Alan Walker. It was released through his YouTube channel on 17 August 2014, before being re-released through NoCopyrightSounds three months later on 19 November to celebrate that channel's one million-subscriber milestone. "Fade" was featured as the seventh song of the NCS: Uplifting album before its removal. However, it was removed on 12 November 2021 due to Walker's contract with NCS expiring. The remake version of "Fade" is "Faded".
Background and release
At first, when creating "Fade", the idea was to create a tropical house sound, but then an electro house drop was inserted into the song. However, tropical house and electro house did not blend well together, so he decided to make it completely electro house. Walker was inspired by the music producer Ahrix's sound on his track "Nova" from 2013. In an interview he stated: "The melodies and the way the track progresses are what's so unique and it's what inspired me to create 'Fade' which later on became 'Faded.'" The style was also inspired by the Norwegian producer K-391.In 2014, Walker sent a song called "Fade" to Billy Woodford, founder of the British record label NoCopyrightSounds, who thought the song was unique and appropriate for the NCS community and released it after it had surpassed one million subscribers.
Commercial performance
"Fade" was Walker's first release and became part of the compilation album NCS: Uplifting. In parallel, the songs offered on this album were offered as free downloads on the company's website and appeared as single tracks on music streaming services such as Spotify and Napster. With its royalty-free release, the song received strong distribution, being used in countless web videos. On both the video platform YouTube and portals such as SoundCloud, "Fade" was a huge success, receiving over 433 million views on YouTube alone. It also reached number 18 on the UK Independent Single Breakers Chart and number 3 on the Swedish Heatseekers Chart in Sweden.Deletion from NCS
On 12 November 2021, Walker's contract with NCS expired, and "Fade", along with "Spectre", was removed from the NCS YouTube channel. At the time, it was NCS's most popular video, with 448.31 million views.After that, NCS addressed the removal of Walker's tracks from the label on Facebook. This was followed by a response from Walker himself.