
“My sense was that people knew they were misfits in the broader electronic music scene,” she said. Given the saccharine sound, jarring pace and extremely low barrier to entry, nightcore increasingly became the butt of jokes and the subject of memes throughout the 2010s.

Over a Zoom call, the ethnomusicologist Emma Winston, who studied the nightcore subculture in 2017, said its community was “beginner positive.” “It was almost as if the idea of good music was replaced with valuing participation in and of itself,” she said. “It was apparent that the subscribers I had gained so far were hoping to hear more music like this.” In 2011, Maikel created, which became a vital forum for nightcore’s growing number of devotees. “Only later when I found a different song that was clearly not from the original group labeled as ‘nightcore’ did I start looking into doing this myself,” he wrote in an email.
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YouTube users, particularly those who were active in the early 2010s, might know them by a different name: nightcore.Ī 27-year-old software engineer from Amsterdam known online as Maikel631 was one of the creators who uploaded Nightcore’s tracks from Limewire to YouTube in 2009. The remixes’ mainstream popularity is unique to the TikTok era, but the formula was created two decades ago. He released “Bad Habit - Sped Up” as a single in July. Some artists, like Steve Lacy, are striving to beat TikTokers to the punch. Sped-up remixes of the Neighborhood’s “Sweater Weather” and Demi Lovato’s “Cool for the Summer” have been used in around 2.5 million videos each, and older songs like Nelly Furtado’s “Say It Right” and Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” have also received the frenetic helium treatment.

Many follow the model that made Imanbek’s remix of Saint Jhn’s “Roses” a global smash in 2020: increasing the track’s speed and pitch-shifting the vocals up to chipmunk octaves.

TikTok’s musical landscape is rife with passing fads, but one trend has had remarkable staying power: Sped-up remixes are a defining characteristic of music on the app, where #spedupsounds has 8.8 billion views.
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