By Sarah Kaufman -
NBC News
One of the latest music trends on the TikTok social network is speeding up popular songs.
And now fans demand artists to meet their expectations.
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 revealing a part of the song with a slower tempo, some fans rebelled.
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“Mother please change the pace,” said one commenter.
“Waittttt I thought I was going to be
throwin it
this summer, not
chillin
,” said another.
Hundreds of fans commented that they wanted a song with a faster pace.
Requests from Petras fans are only part of the explosion of fast-paced songs on the app.
According to a TikTok spokesperson, the number of “speed up” songs has increased in the past year.
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 record labels have jumped on this trend by releasing their own up-tempo remixes of songs.
According to the TikTok spokesperson, remixes tend to have more impact than the original.
For example, in January, rhythm and blues
star
Miguel released an official sped-up version of his 2010 single
Sure Thing
, which went viral on TikTok and entered Billboard's Top 20 at No. 15, over a decade. after its release.
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Bad Friends, a London-based dance-pop producer duo, released their own version of Petras'
Alone
just hours after backlash began to pour in over the slow pace of the last piece released.
The duo posted it on their TikTok and immediately received a barrage of views and comments.
The producers, Noah Tate and Hugo Shaw, explained that their version of the song grew out of their dance-pop
background
and a genuine love of the sampler.
Tate and Shaw knew that people would want to know what a Minaj verse would sound 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
.
“It's always going to be valuable to change the tempo or key of a song.
People also love mixing different songs, even if they've heard the original,” Tate said.
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“From a musician's point of view, I think by speeding up songs and turning them up in pitch, you can listen to them in a different light and get a different feel from them,” Tate said.
The music producer xxtristanxo has 3.5 million followers on TikTok and 5.4 million monthly listeners on Spotify creating accelerated versions of songs and
mashups
[joining two or more songs without adding original music], some of which have more than 20 million plays on Spotify.
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The 21-year-old musician from Raleigh, North Carolina has signed multiple deals with big-name artists and their record labels, which have officially released his sped-up 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 opined.
“If you went to a club, you would go and listen to a remix.
If you went to a concert, you would hear a live version, or a different interpretation.
The sped up songs, the
mashups
and the slowed down versions are TikTok's way of bringing that to people,” he explained.
The up-tempo sound has musical roots dating back to the mid-2000s, when it originated as a subgenre called Nightcore.
Nightcore became a cult following in 2008, when musicians began posting their up-tempo remixes on YouTube, often mixing them with anime footage to boost interest.
The songs are no longer colloquially known as Nightcore and have ceased to be a subgenre to become a trend.
According to Tatiana Cirisano, a music industry analyst and consultant to MiDIA Research, a UK-based research firm that studies entertainment trends, the new prevalence of sped-up sound could be a sign of a new conceptualization of music creation. content among the younger generations.
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“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 to actively participate in what you are a fan of and add something to it, ”she explains.
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The Bad Friends remix is just one example of TikTok users putting their own spin on something they love.
“Tiktok has turned the equation of who makes the decisions in music upside down.
The up-tempo songs are just one part of it,” says Cirisano.
The platform "makes the songs more memeable, makes them almost funny at times."
Speed-up songs are also part of a larger trend: People speed up media to cram as much content as possible in less time, including podcasts
and
YouTube videos, says Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine. who has been studying 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 to your liking.
“People can understand things faster and, if they can, they will.
We have a culture where we want to do as much as we can, fit 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 thanks to her up-tempo remixes, pointed out that short attention spans are one of the reasons why up-tempo songs have become so widespread.
“Because TikTok is a fast-paced app, audiences have a shorter attention span, and the only way to let listeners lock in the best parts of a song is to speed up the tempo of a track,” he explained.
