Was the BPM in electronic music generally higher in the '90s than in this millennium?

To me this seems to be the case, I wonder why the drop in BPM happened?

I'm not talking about genres like (non-UK) hardcore and gabber, where high BPM has always been an essential part of the, rather than techno, house, trance, breakbeat, etc...

Maybe because (with techno especially) the music became less club-oriented, and a lower BPM is nicer for home listening?

How would you determine "generality"?

There's such a broad range that taking a median would be kind of perverse.

Broadly didn't house and techno speed up through the 90s?

Yeah, to me that seems to have been the case, house and techno were slower in the '80s, got faster in the '90s, and the slowed down again.

Obviously something like this impossible to measure objectively, so it's just based on how listening to this stuff for the last 30 years has felt to me.

It's pretty obvious, there are tons of modern remakes/remixes of 1990s tunes, and the first thing they all do is drop the tempo by 10-20 bpm. The charts used to be full of 130+ bpm crossover hits around the mid-90s, you don't get any of that anymore.

I don't think this has anything to do with home listening, plenty of pure club/"dj tools"-driven styles that aren't particularly fast. Just the usual ebb and flow of fashion.

Wouldn't surprise me if on average things are a bit slower, but there's still plenty of higher BPM DJs out there

I really don't think so? Aside from the rise of a lot of high bpm styles (footwork etc etc etc), I thought it was pretty common to hear techno pushed to the 130s & 140s (and I only really like it at 140+, lol).

Relevant:

love that 130 bpm is now considered downtempo

— ariel in paris (@arielzetina) August 19, 2021

There were a few trends in the 00s and 10s (balearic revival, nu-disco, New Beat rehabilitation, ALFOS-type drug chug - you can assume inverted commas around any of those if necessary) that involved dropped tempos, but clearly there were other things trending in the opposite direction. Your focus is going to affect intuitions about general trends. Also the participants in most of those things were probably of an age to a) remember the 90s, b) need to slow down a bit ;-)

An interesting counterpoint to this though is in the development over the last two decades in hip hop and related music that may technically be 160bpm or more but sounds half that with only things like the rapid fire of hi hats or using snares or handclaps on every beat now and then providing an indication of the true rate, allowing for more intricate, sophisticated beats in a digital context.

I think you guys are forgetting about... NIGHTCORE.

Extratone will be skewing the average as well.

i honestly can't fathom why or how anyone would want to or be able to generalize about "electronic music" in this way. the only thing i can think of to say with some confidence is that the advent of computer-based production software made it easier to make high-bpm music (i think that's true, but actual gear heads would know for sure). so it might make some sense to think of "pre-software" electronic music and "post-software" electronic music. afaict it makes absolutely no sense to ask this about 90s music vs music made from 2000-2021 (21 years). unless, of course, you're just fixated on the 90s because those were your raving golden years lol.

Johnny Violent gave us a beautiful roadmap, but we did not follow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLVPfG_RnK0

I feel like in 2006 when I was 18 and discovering clubbing everything was 130bpm, and then it splintered into harder and faster (EDM, dubstep) or slower and softer (deep house, nu-disco). But this is based on simply what DJs I was seeing and parties I was attending - there's always going to be multiple axis of dance and club music I simply don't keep up with (and I pitch everything up anyway).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tuLDSfJTRg

I feel like in 2006 when I was 18 and discovering clubbing everything was 130bpm, and then it splintered into harder and faster (EDM, dubstep) or slower and softer (deep house, nu-disco). But this is based on simply what DJs I was seeing and parties I was attending - there's always going to be multiple axis of dance and club music I simply don't keep up with (and I pitch everything up anyway).

― boxedjoy, Monday, August 23, 2021 8:31 PM (fifty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i didn't live through the 90s (electronic musically speaking) but my perception in hindsight is that bpms sped up because they could and no one had done it before. my anecdotal cherry-picking examples would be something like "finally" by cece peniston (1991, 119 bpm) vs. "free" by ultra nate (1997, 125 bpm). some time in the 2000s, it felt like an era began when dance music essentially started splintering into factions and cycles that referenced the past. all the bpms were being done based on whatever eras the developing scenes or in-fashion sounds wanted to reference. usually a couple of different ones happening simultaneously.

This is going to sound glib but is there not a connection to the prevailing trends in stimulant use at the time?

More affordable samplers with timestretching made fast breakbeat music possible but generally there was nothing stopping tempos being much quicker than they were.

I agree with map above but would note further that there's still lots of fast dance music styles being made, and I think as a proportion probably more than in the early-mid-00s when there definitely was (as noel emits says) a lot of new trends specifically emphasising slower tempos. In particular, faster techno has been a lot bigger since about 2008 then it was for most of the 00s prior, and is probably bigger now than it has been at any stage since the late nineties (at least based on my own anecdotal evidence).

The "prevailing trends in stimulant use" point is an important one but also a complex one, and probably needs to be considered together with what I would reductively call class issues. You can broadly map fast versus slow tempo trends onto the relative prominence of clubs and more professional festivals versus raves. The same drugs play differently in different contexts and among different populations, and different populations use not merely drugs but the entire process of going out clubbing for different purposes (e.g. are people also going out to pick up, to chat with friends, to be seen etc. as well as dance).

Leading on from that, perhaps the biggest shift not already mentioned has been the relative demise of genre-purism: the proportion of people who might go out to a club/rave/festival who are specifically going for a particular style is a lot smaller than in the 90s, and that's broadly reflected in DJ rosters. Music rolling at 115 - 130 bpm is more likely to work with a diverse crowd of dancers than music all pitched at a higher tempo, and I tend to find that sets I am exposed to at higher tempos occur late at night where the DJ is confident that the attending crowd can take it.

All the above said, given long-tail, the proliferation of producers, the rise of streaming/algorithm-playlists and the concomitant reduction in importance of other gatekeepers (e.g. celebrated DJs, music journalism), it's almost impossible to have a view on how this is playing out now that isn't substantially affected by selection/exposure bias.

Booming post :)

Yes, love that, and the algorithm angle is depressing too. It’s certainly contributing to the trend in tracks being shorter but that’s maybe just the most blatant difference and it’s causing all sorts of other subtle havoc

yeah, that's really interesting to read. especially about class and 'going out.'

this is getting tangential but being an internet music nerd shut-in for my teens and twenties, i never really experienced the fire of the social furnace that gets so many young people into it. i can see now how there's escape, fucking, and being seen as this combination of motivations for why people go to parties, with the latter being more appealing for the richer kids and the former being more appealing for the poorer ones. the fucking is appealing to everyone i guess but of course there are different rules of the game to that depending on class background. it makes sense to me that the drugs and the relationship they have with the music would be more affected by those things than like the other way around. just thinking about all the different kinds of potheads i've met, they're just as different as any other random grouping of people would be - i think the social form affects the drugs more than the other way around and same for the music.

Right! Like there has been a shift away from monomaniacally necking pills all night but I think that's more driven by the surrounding context of engagement. Like, that's usually easy enough to do if people want to, but the archetype of a "really big night out" tends to be more multi-faceted and like *pre-loading* --> *first club* --> *kick-ons at home* --> *second club* --> *more kick-ons*, which tends to incline groups towards poly-drug use that reflects and facilitates a mutating vibe over the course of the night, but doesn't determine it.

Really interesting thread and discussion. (Like map, I’ve never been a club/rave person but have enjoyed some of this music as a home listener.)

My general sense of “generic techno” - what was used in media mostly, the sort of thing where no one I knew seemed to know the names of tracks and artists - was that it was indeed faster in the 1990s, obnoxiously swift.

There used to be this semi-comedic thing in films, TV, and real life where (usually a guy) would do this whooping imitation of electronic beats that couldn’t quite match the intended pace and was likely less successfully parodic than intended. Late 90s into the 00s.

But this is a tangent from the subject of the thread - as you were.

my anecdotal cherry-picking examples would be something like "finally" by cece peniston (1991, 119 bpm)
Around the same time, stuff like 2 Unlimited - No Limit (1992, 144 bpm) and all the other frantic diva+rapper-formula songs were all over the pop charts. Also all the Hi-NRG stuff from the 1980s like Pet Shop Boys - It's A Sin (1987, 129 bpm) was pretty fast. The more I'm looking for examples, the less this theory holds up. Both fast and slow crossover hits keep coming out of the clubs for a pretty long period of time.

huh, good point

when i was a kid i thought "techno" always had to be exactly 140bpm. this was during the trance-pop era.

https://img.discogs.com/4ly34FeC9jUViG7ZMZ3HSupeQ_w=/fit-in/600x599/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-171622-1345067717-7900.jpeg.jpg

This was not a suggestion, people. It's the law!

what’s weird is I remember listening to a 4hero cd (four pages?) in like 2005 with a bandmate and is us remarking how much faster contemporary d&b was. I feel like jungle/d&b tempo went down a little bit the more it separated itself from hardcore techno? you can even kinda trace this in the beginning of Speed Limit 140+ part 4 (xp!)

nb: I am probably full of shit

I don't know that jungle slowed down as it separated itself from hardcore, so much as that the basslines and melodies started running at half-speed, which made the tracks feel slower.

For example, Hyper-On Experience's "Lord of the Null-Lines" from 1993 (which is still for all intents and purposes a hardcore track) and Alex Reece's "Pulp Fiction" from 1995 (archetypal mid-90s drum and bass) have about the same BPM I think (about 160), but the latter track feels a lot slower given the lazy, prowling quality of the bass and the saxophone hook, and the general sense of space in the mix.

It's probably the case that hardcore had to speed up from about 140 BPM (e.g. 2 Bad Mice's "Bombscare" from 1992) to about 160 BPM in order for jungle's half-speed tactics to work so effectively.

Towards the end of the 90s things started to speed up even further: Reprazant's "Brown Paper Bag" from 1997 is about 170 BPM and then Bad Company's "The Nine" from 1998 (which is pretty representative both of that era and the majority of D&B since) runs at about 175 BMP I think. It's been rare for D&B to drop below 170 BPM ever since.

I don't think 4 Hero's Two Pages is particularly representative given 4 Hero was already transitioning to broken beat by that point, but something like "Loveless" is still about 160 BPM.

I really don't think so? Aside from the rise of a lot of high bpm styles (footwork etc etc etc), I thought it was pretty common to hear techno pushed to the 130s & 140s (and I only really like it at 140+, lol).

― change display name (Jordan), Monday, 23 August 2021 14:59 (two days ago) link

yeah this is all probably super dependent on geography and scenes and stuff... all the djs in the US underground are playing super hard and fast rn. but then you go somewhere else and it's all 115 bpm amapiano so it can't really be generalized.

And again this can also be affected by DJs themselves - in the 90s you had Tuff Jam playing Masters At Work and Mood II Swing dubs in clubs in London, but at +8% which is obviously a different kind of atmosphere and energy to how they were originally meant to be in New York etc.