Nightcore

Lore & Background

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. They were influenced by pitch-shifted vocals in German group Scooter's hardcore remixes of 'Nessaja' and 'Ramp! (The Logical Song)'. 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 three albums of sped-up versions of trance recordings: its 2002 thirteen-track debut album Energized, Summer Edition 2002, and L'hiver. 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. All of its records were sold to their friends and DJs around the group's area. 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. All three of the project's albums have surfaced on the Internet.

Reader's Guide

Nightcore's significance lies in its influence on both internet meme culture and mainstream music production. 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, which became an internet meme after the nightcore version was posted to YouTube. By the mid-2010s, the nightcore scene had garnered attention from musicians such as Djemba Djemba, Maxo and Harrison, Nina Las Vegas, Ryan Hemsworth, Lido, Moistbreezy, and PC Music founders Danny L Harle and A. G. Cook, who claimed nightcore as an influence. In the 2020s, as TikTok rose to prominence, nightcore went under the more transparent name of 'sped-up.' 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, which became a viral phenomenon on TikTok and led Netflix to use the nightcore version in the announcement trailer for the show's second season. Major recording labels began releasing official sped-up remixes, gaining millions of streams, either releasing three versions (normal, sped-up, and slowed) of a track at the same time or curating popular Spotify playlists for sped-up versions of hit singles.

Did You Know?

• The 35% speed increase causes note C4 to become slightly higher in pitch than note F4, an increase of approximately 5 and one fifth semitones.
• Playing 33⅓-rpm vinyl records at 45 rpm was common in the Happy Hardcore scene of the 90s and 2000s, which most likely inspired the nightcore genre.
• One of the first people to distribute nightcore music on YouTube was a user going by the name Maikel631, beginning in 2008.
• The head of Manicure Records, Tom 'Ghibli' Mike, recalled that artist lilangelboi's nightcore edits led to the label's #MANICURED playlist.