Nightcore

2000s#

The term “nightcore” was first used in 2001 as the name for a school project by Norwegian DJ duo Thomas S. Nilsen and Steffen Ojala Søderholm, known by their stage names DJ TNT and DJ SOS respectively. The duo set a template of a track in the style: a 25–30% speed-up (commonly to around 160 to 180 beats per minute) of a trance or Eurodance song. Nightcore made five albums of sped-up versions of trance recordings, including its 2002 thirteen-track debut album Energized and the group’s later albums Summer Edition 2002, L’hiver, Sensación and Caliente. The group’s first album was made with eJay, while all of its later work was made with what the duo described as “top-secret” programs. Nightcore’s works started appearing on services such as LimeWire in mid-2003 and YouTube in 2006. The first nightcore track to appear on the latter site was “Dam Dadi Doo” by the duo. Only two of the project’s albums have surfaced on the Internet. One of the first people to distribute nightcore music on YouTube was a user going by the name Maikel631, beginning in 2008. The user uploaded about 30 original tracks by Nightcore on the Web site. In 2009, they found a “new” nightcore track, as well as the technique to make material in the style:

2010s#

One of the first viral nightcore videos was for “Rockefeller Street”, the song by Getter Jaani that was chosen to represent Estonia at the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest. The song became an internet meme after the nightcore version was posted to YouTube by a user known as Andrea, who was known as an osu! player. From there, the music rose in popularity with more people applying the nightcore treatment to more non-dance genres such as pop music and hip hop. Many of the pioneer uploaders of nightcore including Maikel631 have called these non-dance edits “fake”. A Thump writer described it as the “groundwork for some of the most innovative club music today” and wrote that it also led to a number of “awful” internet memes: Dance Music Northwest described nightcore as “too catchy, too danceable, and far too much fun to not welcome into the dance music mainstream.”

2020s#

As social media platform TikTok rose to prominence in the 2020s, online music magazine Pitchfork noted: “Much of the music that performs well on TikTok has been modified slightly, either sped-up or slowed-down.” Pitchfork quoted one nightcore TikTok creator: “Editors really enjoy sped-up music because edits with sped-up audios are much more energetic and interesting to watch.” Nightcore has also gone under the more transparent name of “sped-up.” In 2022, a notable example was setting the dance routine performed by the titular character of the Netflix comedy horror series Wednesday to a nightcore version of the song “Bloody Mary” by Lady Gaga. The use of the song and fan recreations became a viral phenomenon on video sharing service TikTok and led to Netflix using the nightcore version in the announcement trailer for the show’s second season. In turn, major recording labels began releasing official sped-up remixes, gaining millions of streams. They either started releasing three versions (normal, sped-up, and slowed) of a track at the same time, or started curating popular Spotify playlists for sped-up versions of hit singles released specifically on their label (such as Warner Music Group).

See also#

• Hands up (music genre)
• Chopped and screwed
• Audio time stretching and pitch scaling
• Vaporwave
• Sigilkore
• Digicore
• HexD
• Slowed and reverb
• Anime song