On TikTok, one of the latest music trends is speeding up popular songs. And now, fans are demanding that artists meet their expectations for fast sounds.
In a recent controversy, Grammy-winning artist Kim Petras faced backlash from her fans after she mocked her new song with Nicki Minaj, «Alone.» After she revealed a part of the track that featured a slower tempo, some fans rebelled.
“Mother please change the pace,” said one commenter. “Wait I thought I would release it this summer, not relax,” said another. Hundreds of fans commented that they wanted a faster-paced song.
Demands from Petras fans are only part of the accelerating boom in songs on the app.
TikTok has seen an increasing number of «revved up» songs take off in the past year, according to a TikTok spokesperson.
The #spedupsounds hashtag has amassed 14.8 billion views, and hundreds of TikTok accounts have gained millions of followers by speeding up songs of their own and posting them to TikTok.
Artists and labels are now leaning into the trend by releasing their own up-tempo remixes of songs.
Remixes will often have even more engagement than the original, according to the TikTok spokesperson. For example, in January, R&B star Miguel released an official sped-up version of his 2010 single, «Sure Thing,» which went viral on TikTok and hit Billboard’s Top 20 at No. 15, more than a decade later. of its release. .
Bad Friends, a London-based dance-pop producer duo, released their own version of Petras’ «Alone» just hours after backlash began piling up over the slow beat on the most recently released snippet. The duo posted it to their TikTok and immediately saw an influx of views and comments. The producers, Noah Tate and Hugo Shaw, said they came to their version of the song from its dance-pop background and a genuine love for the sample. Tate and Shaw knew that people would want to know what a Minaj verse sounded like in the sampler, so they used an AI voice splitting website that allows users to isolate vocals from a song, Tate said. They took Minaj’s verse from her 2012 song «Whip It» and added it to her version of «Alone.»
“There will always be value in changing the tempo or key of a song,” Tate said. «People also love to mix different songs together, even if they’ve heard the original.»
“From a musician’s point of view, I think by speeding up songs and intoning them, you can hear them in a different light and get a different feel from them,” Tate said.
Music producer xxtristanxo has earned 3.5 million TikTok followers and 5.4 million monthly Spotify listeners by creating sped-up versions of songs and mashups, some of which have over 20 million Spotify streams. The 21-year-old musician from Raleigh, North Carolina has signed multiple deals with big-name artists and their record labels that have officially released their up-tempo versions of his songs. In February, xxtristanxo released an official remix of «Die for You» featuring The Weeknd via the XO and Republic Records labels. It has over 8 million streams on Spotify.
“I think people like to hear their favorite songs in different contexts,” xxtristanxo said. “If you went to a club, you would go and listen to a remix. If you were to go to a concert, you would hear a live version or a different interpretation. The sped up songs, mashups and slow versions are really TikTok’s way of giving people that.»
The up-tempo sound has musical roots dating back to the mid-2000s, when it originated as a subgenre called Nightcore. Nightcore built a cult following starting in 2008, when musicians began posting their up-tempo remixes on YouTube, often mixing them with an anime image to increase engagement. The tracks are no longer colloquially known as Nightcore and are no longer a sub-genre, but rather a full-blown trend.
The new prevalence of sped-up sound could be a sign of a new conceptualization of content creation among the younger generation, said Tatiana Cirisano, a music industry analyst and consultant at MiDIA Research, a UK-based research firm. who studies entertainment trends.
“TikTok is one of the first mainstream apps where users are encouraged to put their own spin on their favorite song. They are interested in any way that you can actively participate in something that you are a fan of and add things to it,” he said.
The Bad Friends remix is just one example of users on TikTok adding their own spin to something they love.
“Tiktok has been changing the equation of who makes the decisions in music. The up-tempo songs are just a part of that,” Cirisano said. The platform «makes the songs more memorable, makes them almost funny at times.»
The sped-up songs are also part of a broader trend of people speeding up media to fit as much content as possible in a shorter period of time, including podcasts and YouTube videos, said Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of Calif., Irvine. that she has studied attention span for more than 20 years.
Now that various platforms have the option for users to speed up their media, there’s a new mindset of having more personal autonomy to adjust media to the speed they like, Mark said.
“People can understand things at a faster rate, and because they can, they will. Because we have this culture where we want to try to achieve as much as we can, fit in as much as we can, do as much as we can in our day, and we do that by speeding up the media,” Mark said.
Jovynn, a DJ who has 10.4 million followers on TikTok for posting his up-tempo remixes, said that shortening attention spans is part of why up-tempo songs have become so mainstream.
“Since TikTok is a fast-paced app, the audience has a shorter attention span there, and the only way to let listeners lock on to the best parts of a song is to speed up the BPM. [beats per minute] one track,» he said.