Sped-Up TikTok Audios

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About

Sped-Up TikTok Audios refers to the popularity of using sped-up songs and audios on TikTok. The trend began growing increasingly popular in 2018 and started to see a peak in popularity throughout the 2020s, with sped-up versions of songs gaining millions of views in reuploads on YouTube. As sped-up songs continued to go viral on TikTok, some artists began uploading official sped-up versions of their already released tracks on streaming services like Spotify. The trend is similar to Chipmunk versions of songs and nightcore remixes, both of which involve speeding up songs. In 2022, people began criticizing the trend more frequently for ruining songs, including through memes.

Origin

Precursors

Speeding up songs first became popular online in the early 2000s through the musical genre Nightcore, which consists of speeding up Eurodance and trance tracks. The trend became popular on YouTube in the mid-2000s (examples shown below). Speeding-up songs also became somewhat popular in the Chipmunk versions trend, where, leading up to and following the release of the 2007 movie Alvin and the Chipmunks, people began posting sped-up versions of popular songs to make them resemble songs sung by Alvin and the Chipmunks. However, many of these videos are not sped up and have simply been pitched up.

Sped-Up Musical.ly / TikTok Songs

Speeding up songs has been a popular trend on TikTok since as early as 2016 when it was called Musical.ly. For example, on March 30th, 2016, a YouTuber^[1] uploaded a video titled "Musically Sped Up Song" consisting of Megan Trainor's "No" sped up. On April 30th, 2017, YouTuber^[2] Famous Musically uploaded a compilation of Musical.ly videos where sped-up tracks can be heard throughout, including a sped-up version of "iSpy" at the 5:02 minute mark (shown below), garnering over 90,000 views in five years. It's unclear what the first viral sped-up track on either Musical.ly or TikTok was.

On November 5th, 2018, Twitter^[3] user @nanasehirokawa posted, "sped up tiktok songs is the nightcore of this era," marking the first mention of sped-up TikTok songs on Twitter.

Spread

Sped-up TikTok sounds became increasingly popular in the late 2010s leading into the 2020s. One example is a sped-up version of Nicki Minaj's song "Roman Holiday," which was posted to TikTok^[4] by @stanaccountsog on September 22nd, 2019, and was used over 800,000 times in three years. Sped-up songs became very popular by early 2022. For example, in January 2022, a trend set to a sped-up remix of Nelly Furtado's "Say It Right" became popular (examples shown below).^[5]

On January 7th, 2022, Instagram^[6] user breakingbad_irony posted an ironic Breaking Bad meme with a caption about TikTokers vibing to "horrible" sped-up tracks, garnering over 50,000 plays in nine months (shown below). It was reposted by Instagram^[7] user pampam.mp4 that day, garnering over 275,000 views in the same span of time.

By early 2022, YouTubers^[8]^[9] like TikTokTunes were gaining millions of views by reuploading popular sped-up remixes of songs to YouTube, including two uploads in February 2022 that gained 29 million and 15 million views respectively in eight months (shown below, left and right). On March 25th, Spotify^[10] user Speed Radio began uploading popular sped-up songs from TikTok to the platform, gaining over 7.3 million monthly listeners and boasting over 27 million plays on his most popular upload as of October 2022.

That year, it became increasingly popular for musical artists with popular sped-up tracks on TikTok to upload official sped-up versions of their tracks to streaming platforms. For example, on May 13th, Michael Buble released a sped-up version of his song "Sway" to Spotify^[11] after it went viral on TikTok^[12] (examples shown below) gaining over 13 million plays on Spotify in five months. On September 29th, Refinery 29^[13] published an article about speeding up songs on TikTok. On October 13th, Oliver Tree uploaded a sped-up version of his song "Miss You" to Spotify^[14] after it went viral on TikTok.^[15]

Un Poco Loco (sped-up)

A line from the Disney/Pixar movie, Coco, "You make me un poco loco", in the song by Anthony Gonzalez and Gael García Bernal has gone viral thanks to a sped-up version uploaded on the platform in May 2022, by @bestspedup^[16]. The sound has accumulated 283,300 videos on TikTok and the hashtag #unpocoloco has 347.6M views on the platform.

The trend consists of a series of videos made by creators where they joke about relationships and absurd imagined conversations, as the lyrics of the music “Un poco loco” means “a little crazy” in Spanish. “You make me un poco loco” can also be translated into “you drive me a little crazy”. @ray_kenley and lauracasquerooo888 videos showcase some of the usages of this audio, both referring to their reactions to relationship drama.