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“Bloody Mary” is a song by Lady Gaga that was released on the 2011 album Born This Way. As it wasn’t one of the five singles chosen by the singer, for over ten years listeners were mostly fans who listened to the album in its entirety, but the song itself wasn’t among Lady Gaga’s most famous. Then, in late November, a sped-up version of the song was used in tens of thousands of TikTok videos as the backdrop to a choreography inspired by the prom scene in the Netflix series Wednesday. On January 9, 2023, “Bloody Mary” debuted on the Billboard Hot 100, the chart of the most listened to and sold songs in the US market, and has been on radio in many countries for the past two months.
Accelerated – or more rarely slowed down – remixes of songs are not an absolute novelty: “Nightcore Edits” were already circulating in certain niches of enthusiasts in the early 2000s, i.e. cover versions that were created by increasing the tonality and accelerating the tempo of the 10-30 owned original songs. But lately, they’ve gained tremendous popularity thanks to TikTok, which has fairly lax rules on how to use copyrighted songs and easy-to-use tools that allow anyone to remix a song.
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In The New York Times, Cassidy George wrote that the proliferation of these songs on TikTok can also be explained by “a very simple algorithmic logic: Accelerated songs are strong in the app because they contain a greater amount of emotional and lyrical information over a period of time shorter time, and therefore they coexist very well with the decrease in the ability to sustain attention».
According to Jacob Byrnes, who handles content creator relationships for Universal, one of the largest record labels in the world, about 80 of the top 100 songs used as background music on TikTok are accelerated versions. The videos under the hashtag #spedupsongs (#spedupsongs) have been viewed 4.1 billion times and often contribute to bringing the original back into fashion, such as with “Bloody Mary” but also with “Sag es correctly” by Nelly Furtado and I’m Not the Only One by Sam Smith. Accelerated remixes of old pop classics like ABBA’s “Angel Eyes” were also successful.
Sometimes the sped up version is heard even more than the original on some platforms: this happened with Joseline Hernandez’s “Vegas (I Wanna Ride)” which has 8 million views on YouTube versus 19 million for the remix.
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«In the past we have used remixes to diversify a record’s visibility with the aim of bringing attention back to the main version. Now people discover the sped up or slowed down version first and then the main version,” Universal’s Nima Nasseri told Billboard. “Instead of spending $50,000 to ask a great DJ to do a remix, we spend relatively small amounts on an expedited cover and have a lot more success.”
Various video artists like @itsjovynn (10.2 million followers), @spxedupsongs (5 million) and @xxtristanxo (3.3 million followers) have become very popular because they specialize in this kind of covers and now they are going direct approached by marketing companies to create and release accelerated versions of certain songs. In other cases, record labels choose to release the official version of these accelerated remixes themselves. For the most part, though, they’re still covers made with passion, often by very young fans, and without the permission of the original copyright holder.
– Also read: The golden age of fandom
This particular type of song is so ubiquitous on TikTok that in the comments of various videos you can often find people admitting that they no longer have the patience to listen to the original version because they find it too slow.
«Instagram and TikTok are constantly training our brains to search faster and faster for the next video, the next post, the next stimulus every day. Accelerated songs are probably just the logical conclusion of this process of reducing attention spans: a quick and easily digestible assault on the senses that eliminates superfluous details like meaning or context in favor of a more recognizable atmosphere like a sonic wallpaper,” wrote critic Matt Mullen MusicRadar. “Accelerated songs are brighter, livelier and more inspirational than their slow counterparts. They also give people a new way to experience songs they know and love but are bored of.”
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