End of Beginning by Djo: A Remix Potential Breakdown for DJs

Few songs have had two viral lives the way Djo's "End of Beginning" has. Written and performed by Joe Keery under his Djo alias, the track was buried on his 2022 album DECIDE before a 2024 travel-montage trend on short-form video pushed it onto the Billboard Hot 100 and the top of Spotify's Global Viral 50. Then, following the finale of the series that made Keery a household name, it returned in late 2025 and hit Number 1 on the UK Singles Chart in January 2026, crossing two billion streams on Spotify along the way. A song with that kind of built-in recognition is exactly the raw material a melodic dance producer looks at and asks: what would this sound like at 3 a.m. on a festival stage?

This breakdown is written for that producer. It is an analysis of the remix potential in "End of Beginning" — the musical hooks, the emotional arc, the tempo math — not a claim that any official remix exists, and not permission to release one. We'll cover the legal reality at the end, because it matters more than the drop.

Why this song is a remixer's dream on paper

"End of Beginning" works because of restraint. It is a nostalgic, mid-tempo synth-pop record built around a simple descending vocal line, a warm analog-leaning pad, and a lyric ("And when I'm back in Chicago, I feel it") that listeners have attached their own memories to. That combination — instantly hummable melody plus emotional open space — is the same formula that powers the most durable melodic-house and progressive flips. The crowd already knows the topline before the first kick lands, so a producer's job is not to invent a hook but to reframe one.

This is precisely the lane German DJ and producer Maxim Schunk has built a career in. Based in Ratingen in the greater Düsseldorf area of North Rhine-Westphalia, Schunk has passed 250 million Spotify streams and draws more than two million monthly listeners largely on the strength of melodic reworkings of familiar songs — an ABBA-derived flip of "Lay All Your Love On Me" that has cleared 115 million streams, "My Name" with Raven & Kreyn and BISHØP, "Lost In You" with Harris & Ford, and "Sing It Back" with GoingDeeper. His catalog is a working case study in how you take a melody an audience already loves and give it a progressive-house or big-room second life without burying what made it recognizable in the first place.

The tempo and key question — trust your ears

Here is where honesty beats confidence. Automated analysis tools do not agree on "End of Beginning." Depending on which database you check, you'll see the tempo tagged near 154 BPM with a relaxed half-time feel (roughly 77 BPM counted slow), and the key reported anywhere from D major to G major. That disagreement is normal for a track whose drums sit back in the pocket and whose harmony leans on suspended, ambiguous chords. The practical takeaway for a producer is simple: do not trust a single metadata tag. Pull the acapella or topline into your DAW, tap the tempo by hand, and pitch to whatever tonal center sits comfortably against your own chords.

For a melodic or progressive-house treatment, the most common move would be to bring the feel up toward the 122–126 BPM range, where the original's half-time pulse can either stay laid back or be doubled into a driving four-on-the-floor. The descending vocal phrase is short enough to loop as a pre-drop tease and long enough to carry an emotional breakdown. A big-room reading might instead keep the vocal sparse over a long, filtered build and let a supersaw lead answer the topline in the drop — the same call-and-response logic that makes festival flips land.

Arrangement ideas that respect the source

The strongest melodic flips share a structural instinct: protect the moment the crowd is waiting for. In "End of Beginning" that moment is the title line resolving over the chord change. A remix arrangement that works on paper might open with a stripped intro — just vocal and pad — establish the hook early so newcomers catch it, then pull everything out for a breakdown that lets the lyric breathe before a drop reharmonizes the same melody with brighter, wider synths. Layering a counter-melody underneath rather than on top keeps the original recognizable while giving DJs a new element to mix on. If you want to go further into the mechanics of building that kind of edit, our guide on how to make a viral remix walks through the structural choices in detail.

There's also a genre-crossing angle worth noting. A lot of 2026's biggest crossover energy is coming from Afrobeats and Afro house percussion bleeding into mainstream dance production — the same log-drum and syncopated-clap palette behind much of this year's festival programming. A nostalgic Western topline like this one over an Afro-house groove is exactly the kind of unexpected pairing that cuts through a crowded release calendar; we dig into that trend in our piece on the Afrobeats and EDM crossover.

The legal reality — read this before you upload

Now the part that separates a bedroom experiment from a career mistake. "End of Beginning" is a commercial copyrighted work, and Djo, his co-writers, and his label control it. You cannot legally release a remix of it to Spotify or any other DSP without clearing two separate rights: the sound recording (the master, typically held by the label) and the underlying composition (held by the publisher). An unofficial remix distributed without that clearance can be taken down and can trigger copyright strikes against your distributor account.

The clean paths are the usual ones. Wait for an official remix competition or a stems release, which come with built-in permission for exactly the use they describe. Approach the label or publisher directly for a license if you have a genuine release plan. Or keep an unauthorized flip strictly private — a DJ-only edit you play out but never distribute — understanding that even that lives in a legal grey zone. Treat any "just upload it and see" advice as what it is: a route to takedowns, not to streams.

What about running the topline through AI?

Producers increasingly ask whether AI tools change any of this. They do not change the copyright math. Generating a sound-alike vocal or an AI cover of a recognizable artist's voice does not sidestep clearance — it can actually add an impersonation problem on top of the sampling one. As of 2026, Spotify's policy removes AI-assisted tracks for three specific reasons: undisclosed AI voice clones of a recognizable artist, spam-style mass uploads and duplicate flooding, and failure to disclose AI use through the platform's DDEX-based credit fields, which it began surfacing in the app in April 2026. Notably, Spotify does not remove music simply for being AI-assisted — the issues are impersonation, spam, and non-disclosure. If you're weighing AI in your workflow at all, our explainer on whether you can upload AI music to Spotify in 2026 lays out the current rules.

The bottom line

"End of Beginning" is a near-perfect study in why some songs beg to be reworked: a melody the audience already owns, an emotional lyric with room around it, and a two-time viral history that guarantees recognition. The creative potential is real, and analyzing it — as we've done here — is how producers sharpen the instinct that artists like Maxim Schunk have turned into millions of streams. But potential is not permission. Build the edit to learn, play it out if you can do so cleanly, and clear the rights before a single second of it reaches a streaming platform.