The art of speeding up and slowing down music is probably not new to anyone.

Many first found such wonders mischievously playing around with the living room record or tape players of their childhoods. The sounds of sped-up and slowed-down music eventually find themselves ingrained in the collective psyche of each generation, it seems.

It has been adopted into the repertoire of musical style itself. Just look to the pitched-up whimsy of PC Music and hyperpop, or the stretched lumbering glob of DJ Screw and his chopped and screwed remix technique. The auditory ghosts of the past can make their way into the present and stay there quite comfortably.

On social video app TikTok, speeding up and slowing down music is par for the course, a necessity in fitting tempo to different dance trends. It organically grew into one of the main ways users on the app engage with sounds, with sped-up and slowed-down edits commonly becoming more popular than the original recordings. In some cases, the original recording is obscured, and the altered edit is the only thing that exists in mass memory.

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Record companies, as they are known to do, found a way to monetise this trend towards their benefit. New and older releases picking up steam in TikTok’s algorithm have seen the release of official sped-up and slowed-down versions, coming factory prepackaged, removing the step of amateur app editing entirely.

The choice of what labels release usually fits alongside the tastes of the app’s young users. Massive recent pop stars like Sabrina Carpenter release altered tempo versions of new songs as almost a courtesy to their large fanbase on the platform.

It is also an advantage to the overall numbers game. Different versions of the same song are counted all the same for chart positions and sales numbers, and different versions becoming popular roll these figures all into one. There are now many cracks to slip and weave through and get ahead in the music industry when it comes to how numbers are arrived at, as they get obfuscated through the nature of digital music and its consumption in various ways.

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But sometimes the unexpected makes its way into a trend. Jazz singing legend Billie Holiday saw one of her several recordings of ‘Solitude’ reach the TikTok algorithm. Her delicate contralto voice is sped up into a squeaky fairy-sounding aberration or slowed down even further than the original’s already languid rhythm. For the official sped-up and slowed-down versions, it’s clear that a pitch dial was turned and walked away from without further thought.

‘Solitude’, a Duke Ellington standard interpreted time and again throughout the golden age of jazz, fully comes to life when Holiday puts her fragile vibrato and devastating sense of ennui behind the words. It conveys, in such real fashion, the singer’s life-weary heart, and what constituted such a distinct and special artistic personality. ‘Solitude’ hangs heavy from how vulnerable and open she allows herself to be, the emotions channelled through her vocal performance giving such an intense, beautiful depth.



And so, it is strange and tone-deaf that haphazard edits are being officially released to make quick money off the back of a social media trend. Users on TikTok are simply using the language of the platform, and ‘Solitude’ has found its way into that. But owner of Holiday’s music, Universal, has a much greater responsibility towards her work, legacy, and integrity.

There is a case of preservation around a legacy artist like Holiday. It is important for the work to remain in context, and to be presented after her death in a manner that aligns with the original artistic intention. By releasing official slowed-down and sped-up versions, her label has effectively created new work under her name and presented it in a so-modern-it-hurts fashion. There is a disconnect in that, a dissonance instilled from the record industry’s obsession with renewing and repackaging vast and lucrative back catalogues. Holiday is not the only legacy artist to see their work reduced to mere fodder.

A song like ‘Solitude’ breaking into TikTok’s algorithm is, for all intents and purposes, a positive thing. It exposes younger people to important and captivating work of the past in a manner that they can process and understand. The language of someone trying to pass down such things to them is alienating, and would probably be dismissed, but its appearance and use in a social media environment can help build an understanding where there was none before.

There is no ‘right’ way to appreciate an artist like Holiday, but there certainly is a wrong way, and adding new work and recontextualising the original purely on the motives of profiting from a trend is almost certainly the wrong way.