Britain’s top-selling singles, ranked by beats per minute
Pop music is frequently fickle, but there’s one aspect in which it has remained remarkably consistent across the decades: how fast the songs are. The above graph shows the number of beats per minute (BPM) in each year’s bestselling singles going back to 1960.
By and large, songs that have triumphed in the charts have had a BPM of 85 or higher. They fall into two main sweet spots: the Killing Me Softly speed (85-95 BPM) and the Don’t Leave Me This Way speed (115-130 BPM). (Where there was uncertainty, which is relatively common when you consider that a 4/4 bar readily divides into two beats of two or four of four, we used the pulse of the bass as a guide.) The notable exception occurs in the early Nineties when, perhaps as a reaction to the frenzied pace of Black Box and others in the Eighties, or possibly because of the Ghost soundtrack featuring the Righteous Brothers, things became more sedate. (The emergence of grunge, with its more plodding rhythms, may well have played a hand, too.)
Either way, it wasn’t until Cher’s Believe in 1998 that record buyers put the pace back on. And give or take a Will Young hit or two, we haven’t taken our collective foot off the musical accelerator since.
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13 Responses to “Britain’s top-selling singles, ranked by beats per minute”
Intersting to see the re-release of Do They Know It’s Christmas was about 10BPM quicker than the original.
And is Cliff really the slowest? Even more than Amazing Grace?
Sunday News « Mixtapes for Hookers - August 23, 2009
[...] top-selling UK singles of each year, ranked by beats per minute. The Beatles’ Can’t Buy Me Love is by far the fastest, and maybe the best. (The [...]
Well, I don’t wish to be the party pooper, but this is at best incomplete research. It merely suggests that chart-topping singles need to be somewhat up-tempo, which will probably come as little surprise. Indeed, the arbitrary lower cut-off point of 85 beats/min is questionabale, given that some 13 or so hits fall below it, which is more than a quarter of the total.
To put things in perspective, we’d need to see the distribution for a selection of also-rans. Who’s to say that a preponderance of them are not extremely (excessively? painfully?)up-tempo?
Conclusion - a reasonable up-beat tempo is needed for No 1 success - itself no guide to melodic or rhythmic quality. In other words, a good tempo is necessary but not sufficient for chart success.
Erm, whoever worked this out has no idea about bpm. They have obviously used a counter which can often throw up bizarre measurements such as “Cant buy me love” having a bpm faster than a dutch gabba hardcore track!
I feel that charity records and christmas no.1s has skewed the graph a little.
The year of punk (1977) is represented by Mull of kintyre, and the height of britpop (1997) has the 3th slowest song in the graph. The slowest is in 1988, hardly a year for slow songs.
Maybe an average of the top 5 selling records would be more accurate.
Er, wow. Next thing you’ll be telling us is that there’s a strong correlation between popularity of music and the presence of a melody…or lyrics.
I find the logic of this a bit flaky. What were the average BPMs of other songs that year? If 90% were 85BPM+ plus, then it’s not proof that songs of that speed do well, just that there a lot of them. Plus 80 - 130BPM seems quite common there, which is quite a wide range.
virtually every song released will fit between 85 and 130 bpm.
I bet I can prove that virtually every song that was a christmas no.1 was between 85 and 130 bpm,
or virtually every no.2
or virtualy every no.37.
next week:
a report on most car crashes happening between 20 and 100 mph?
It’s not rocket science. For people to be able to dance to music it has to be above a 110 - 115bpm. Disco is nearly religiously in and around 120bpm. Most dance music on the radio is around 140bpm and higher. Most RnB is horrible to dance to because it’s around 100bpm or less.
Around 80bpm sounds very slow - 60 or less is funeraly slow. You’ll hear next to no music with a 60bpm as it sounds very weird.
The bpm in the list for the beatles she loves you, at 75bpm, looks way slower then I’d expect. The bpm figures I get from a google search give me 150bpm, which sounds about right.
Using the pulse of the bass is not a good guide for calculating the tempo or bpm. In the beatles she loves you, from memory, throughout there are two bass pulses per bar. If the beat has been calculated by counting the bass pulses then you’ll get the wrong time. 75bpm instead of 150bpm.
Drummers and bass players rarely play each beat - Except in solid 4 to the floor electronic dance music. Usually the first down beat of the bar is always played - then the other 3 beats of 4/4 may either be there or accentuated by their absence.
There are many ways of calculating the tempo - the easiest being using an automate computer bpm counter.
The real mystery in music tempo is not the number of beats per minute - it’s why some music with a slow tempo sounds fast and some music with a faster tempo can perceived as slow.
But an even greater mystery is how Rick Astley can have the top selling single for 1987, with never going to give you up. It’s torture to listen to it once - An artist so awful, someone burned down the recording studio he was putting the finishing touches to his second album in.
It could all be to do with Faustian pacts and bad haircuts then the tempo
this doesn’t show much at all. just the bpm of the best selling record of the year.
This is not news. It is something I noticed and discussed at length with fellow musicians many years ago. Another interesting phenomenon occurs if one observes the records revolving on the turntable, if you still have such articles. There seems to be a relationship between the 45 R.P.M speed, and the playing music as well. Observing the record whilst playing appears to have a strangely hypnotic effect, which I almost always observed with the successful recordings of the day. All gone now, of course. Digitalised recording has knocked the guts out of them. Don’t think so? Just play Little Richard, particularly Bill Haley’s Brunswick recordings,for example, in their original versions on a good hi-fi and you’ll never want to hear a Cd or Mp3 again. Same thing applies to magnetic tape recordings. They are far superior , that’s why the old records sound better-because they came from tape. Progress doesn’t always mean progress.
The tempo of Meatloaf’s I’ll Do Anything for Love could also be doubled for the faster verses bringing it more in line with Cher’s Believe.
Are you sure you’ve counted the beats correctly? This chart shows “Hey Jude” faster than “She Loves You.” There are other counts that don’t seem right to me, and in all cases, the count is much too low. “Karma Chameleon” shows on the chart at about 100 BPM. It’s actually 186. People with greater knowledge of these songs than I have (i.e., almost everyone) should check some of them. As a baseline, think of a typical marching band tempo or “Billie Jean,” both 120 BPM.
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