LangBeat | Music Analysis, Stems & Song Structure

The Tempos Music Is Actually At

Tempo is the one musical fact almost every file claims to know and almost every file gets wrong. Tags are typed by hand, inherited from a rip, or copied from a store listing. LangBeat measures BPM with a beat tracker running on the audio, so the numbers below are what the records do rather than what their metadata says.

Counted across 7,050 analysed public tracks with a measured tempo.

The most common tempos

488 of the 7,050 measured tracks land on 128 BPM, making it the most common single tempo in the catalogue. Every row below links to the full list at that tempo.

  1. 128 BPM488 tracks
  2. 126 BPM378 tracks
  3. 120 BPM342 tracks
  4. 130 BPM294 tracks
  5. 129 BPM258 tracks
  6. 123 BPM255 tracks
  7. 125 BPM184 tracks
  8. 124 BPM182 tracks
  9. 133 BPM153 tracks
  10. 100 BPM152 tracks
  11. 115 BPM148 tracks
  12. 140 BPM142 tracks
  13. 110 BPM139 tracks
  14. 112 BPM133 tracks
  15. 117 BPM122 tracks
  16. 127 BPM119 tracks
  17. 108 BPM111 tracks
  18. 122 BPM107 tracks
  19. 103 BPM105 tracks
  20. 136 BPM103 tracks

Why tempos cluster

Producers work to round numbers because everything else in a session does: a project is started at a tempo, a loop pack is sold at a tempo, and a DJ set is built around records that will beatmatch without a pitch fader. Tracks within half a beat per minute of each other hold a blend without audible drift, which is why the tempo pages here group to the nearest whole number rather than to a band.

Half-time and double-time relationships matter as much as the number itself. A record at 140 BPM and one at 70 BPM share a pulse, so the two mix together even though nothing about the tags suggests it.