Why is TikTok obsessed with slowed songs?

Music is perhaps the most immediate art for people, the one that first touches people's hearts and minds. This is another reason why TikTok is probably the most effective social network of the moment, because it is the only one that relies not only on video but also on its acoustic counterpart, specifically music. At a time when it takes very little to go viral, we have found that TikTok is sometimes the social network that musicians can rely on the most, because becoming famous on TikTok is now - paradoxically - more productive than being famous on Spotify. What goes viral is never a given: it all depends on the algorithm and user interactions, but sometimes it takes very little to reach millions and millions of views. That's what happens with some songs that might only get tens of thousands of listens in their original version, but in the version that goes viral on TikTok, they easily break the one million streams barrier.

Some pundits have drawn comparisons to the hip-hop stripped-down squirrel that helped Kanye West achieve success with his productions in the first half of the 2000s, but the phenomenon of slowed-down or sped-up songs is something much bigger than the simple concept of music genre. When a four-year-old song by The Weeknd - Call Out My Name - finds success on TikTok, it's easy to understand why: it's the filtered, slowed-down or sped-up version of TikTok. These days, therefore, it would not be surprising if someone told me they preferred a song 'on TikTok's version' to the original. These kinds of songs are becoming so popular that they sometimes even appear on Spotify under a different name or even in podcast format to get around copyright laws that would prevent fans from uploading their own remixes of existing songs. The reason for the success of slowed down or sped up songs is not just because of how much better a modified song is than the original. In fact, there is research on how much a sped up or slowed down sound brings more well-being to people who are entranced by these alternative sounds that are different from the usual. For a society that actively works with sounds, this is a great strength, and the same goes for the authors of the songs that go viral.

If you search for 'slowed down songs' in the TikTok search bar, you will find numerous videos with millions of views, gathering all those songs that 'you too have heard at least once'. These include, for example, such well-known songs as Woman by Doja Cat and Get Lucky by Daft Punk, or lesser-known ones like Agony by Yung Lean (who is at home on TikTok because he has already had success with other songs on the Chinese social network). It is no exaggeration to say that it is now easier to find the modified version of certain songs first, even before the original version. It is as if the hand of the artist is weakening in favour of the hand of the listener who modifies a song to his taste and breathes new life into it, making it the talk of the town even before the singer who inspired it. One should now ask how long the trend of slowing down and speeding up the tempo of songs will continue and, above all, whether it will influence the market and the music industry. Perhaps it has already partially succeeded, but TikTok has already accustomed us to songs that can still top the charts many years after their release (Running Up That Hill ring a bell?). Curiosity therefore remains high as to whether artists will soon release their own slowed-down or sped-up tracks of their own free will - Ellie Goulding, for example, has already done so this year with the sped-up version of Lights.