
At the same time, the songs tended to actually be more repetitive. “The average just started creeping up and up and up and just got longer and longer. “If you go back to the Beatles’ early records in the ’60s, the average pop song was two minutes long,” Rosin says. In 2020, data researchers at UCLA found that the mean duration of songs was approaching the lowest it had been since 1930. A 2018 study of Billboard Hot 100 hits found that the duration of hit songs had been falling for most of the 2010s. Larry Rosin, president of the audio-focused market research firm Edison Research, relates the latest sped-up trend to pop culture’s overall inclination toward shorter songs in recent years. 2” borrow elements from experimental pop. These movements are now more mainstream than ever hyperpop duo 100 Gecs recently charted on the Billboard 200 with their major-label debut album, and hit songs like PinkPantheress and Ice Spice’s “Boy’s a Liar Pt.
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But the current iteration of sped-up songs is specifically arriving at the crossroads of the “slowed + reverb” phenomenon (which itself was inspired by chopped-and-screwed music) and hyperpop (the kinetic and often abrasive genre pioneered by Sophie and PC Music). “It’s more of whatever they say goes, and it’s about how you respond to it.”īut what’s with the need for speed, anyway? The concept of speeding songs up is not new-chipmunk soul and nightcore have long existed, as have pitched-up vocals. “It’s just too late in the game to be questioning Gen Z or questioning TikTok,” she says. Spotify, The Ringer’s parent company, has an official “sped up songs” playlist with 100 songs and 1.4 million likes.Īmber Grimes, executive vice president and general manager of the record label LVRN, which represents Walker, says that social media trends are just another aspect of the music industry now. In late 2022, R&B breakthrough Summer Walker put out a sped-up version of her 2018 mixtape, Last Day of Summer, after a few of the remixed songs popped off on TikTok. In January, SZA released a remix pack for her hit “Kill Bill” that included a sped-up version. Regardless, these remixes are spreading their reach beyond TikTok and into record labels, pop radio, and the Billboard charts. Maybe it was uploaded by an anonymous TikTok account. Maybe it’s a sped-up remix that the original artist released themselves. Let Steve Lacy’s helium voice guide you through a video about “celebrities who didn’t let fame change them.” Maybe it’s a new song that got the sped-up treatment. Perhaps you’ve encountered this trend in the wild: You might notice a sped-up song accompanying a DIY craft video or a makeup experiment. It was a new peak for the single-and was tied for the highest peak of any song of Miguel’s career.Īll because someone thought it would be cool if Miguel sounded more like a chipmunk than, well, Miguel. But listeners responded: first on TikTok, then on streaming platforms, then on the charts. On the surface, it’s the same song, just faster, complete with Miguel’s croon pitched up to a helium tone. In Miguel’s case, the sped-up remix bumped “Sure Thing” from 81 to 105 bpm and became a wildly popular audio on TikTok. Think of it in comparison to watching Netflix or listening to audiobooks at 1.25x playback speed. But “Sure Thing” got a massive boost because of one of pop music’s latest big trends: the sped-up remix, one that simply takes the original song and makes it faster, adding little-and sometimes nothing-else.
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That may not seem like a novel occurrence after songs by Fleetwood Mac and Kate Bush have found new lives in recent years, and it’s no secret that TikTok virality is the hottest ticket to a hit single. That is, until something curious happened: It reentered the charts, 12-plus years after its original release. With love-conquers-all lyrics over a mid-tempo beat and sparse electric guitar, the song was bound to pop up at the odd wedding or on playlists exchanged between Tinder matches, but ultimately it seemed to have run its course. 36 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the months after its release. The 2010 single from his debut album, All I Want Is You, topped out at no.

Miguel’s “Sure Thing” was destined to be a cult hit.
