Pop BPM

How fast, and who says so

Where the two sources overlap: 80–104 BPM. Each in its own words:

• Splice, 5 music producer trends (2016): 80–104 BPM
• Orphiq, BPM Chart by Genre (2026): 60–140 BPM

The groove on this page

The beat here is pop at its plainest: a kick on one, on the and of two and on three, a clap on two and four, closed hats on the eighths and a quiet shaker in 16ths, all straight. It plays at 98, inside the 80 to 104 the hit counts give; press + to 120 or 128 and the same beat turns into early-2010s dance-pop. A pop beat at 98 feels faster than its number because the hats and the vocal move at double.

On this page: the app's Bright kit at 98 BPM, straight 16ths.

Delay and LFO values

A delay in time with the track repeats once per note value: a quarter note lasts 60,000 divided by the BPM, in milliseconds. Dotted is one and a half times that, triplet two thirds. An LFO synced to a note value cycles at 1,000 divided by those milliseconds, in Hz. The table follows the tempo above: − and + move it, and so does a tempo you tap.

Genres near this tempo

• R&B: 80–90 BPM
• Hip hop: 85–95 BPM
• Reggaeton: about 90 BPM
• Afrobeats: 100–115 BPM

All twenty genres on one axis, with 98 BPM marked: the BPM chart.

What BPM is pop music?

Two answers, and both hold. The genre charts (Musical U, BPMcalc, Beats Per Minute Online) give pop 100 to 130 BPM. Counts of actual hits come out slower: Splice saw 80 to 104 trending among number ones in 2016, Soundfly averaged the 2018 Billboard top five at 92.6 (reported by Rolling Stone), Hit Songs Deconstructed the 2019 top ten at 91. The gap is a decade. Around 2009 to 2013 pop borrowed house's 128 (I Gotta Feeling, We Found Love); from the mid-2010s it took the laid-back 90s and low 100s of hip-hop; the 2020s spread it out again, from Anti-Hero at 97 to Blinding Lights at 171.

If you need a starting tempo for a new pop song, try 95 to 120 and let the hook decide where inside it. Sing the chorus over a metronome at 95, 108 and 120 and keep the tempo where the words sit without rushing.

Pop songs by BPM

Tempos as the BPM databases and lists give them, rounded, as of October 2026; Sugar, Houdini and Girls Just Want to Have Fun at 120 are songdata.io's, I Love It is SongBPM's. A database can show a song at double or half the tempo you feel; tap along on the pad above to settle it.

The 126-to-130 row is what the playlists of pop songs with the same BPM are built from: one tempo, so a DJ can run them back to back. Pop songs at 120 BPM run at two beats a second, the tempo a new DAW project opens at (more on that below). At 140 sit Beat It and Shivers; Toxic (143) and Physical (147) are a few BPM above. The pad compares a tap with 80 to 104, the hit counts of 2016 to 2019, so a dance-pop song at 120 to 128 shows as above it: faster than those years' hits, still pop.

Pop drum pattern

The groove on this page, one bar of 16ths, counted 1 e and a, 2 e and a:

Two changes cover most of pop. A kick on every beat makes it dance-pop, the four-on-the-floor of the 128 row. A clap on beat 3 alone, with the kick spread out, gives the half-time feel many slow songs use: a song at 140 that the body hears at 70.

Is 90 BPM slow? Is 100 BPM fast?

In pop, neither. Classical tempo words put 90 and 100 inside andante, a walking pace (about 76 to 108), and 108 to 120 at moderato, but pop rarely feels that slow, because hats, shakers and the vocal move in 16ths, two or four to the beat. A pop song feels slow below about 80 (the ballads in the first row), mid-tempo from 90 to 115, driving from 120 to 130, and fast from 140, where listeners start to count it at half.

The fastest music is speedcore, about 300 to 600 BPM; splittercore runs 600 to 1,000 and extratone 1,000 and up, where the kicks blur into a buzz. A "10,000 BPM" track is extratone, not pop (Wikipedia, Speedcore).

Why 120 and 128 keep coming up

120 is two beats a second, 500 ms a beat, and the tempo a new project opens at in Ableton Live, Logic Pro and GarageBand (FL Studio opens at 130). A lot of demos start at 120 and never move. 128 is house's tempo: the dance-pop of the early 2010s was made by club producers such as Calvin Harris and David Guetta, at the tempo DJs could mix into their sets.

Hyperpop, K-pop and the other pops

Hyperpop, the sound of SOPHIE, A. G. Cook's PC Music and 100 gecs, has no house tempo: tracks run anywhere from club tempo to past 160, often switching inside a song, with pitched-up vocals and distorted drums. K-pop switches tempo and feel inside one song more than Western pop does; BPMcalc gives it 100 to 140, and Dynamite sits at 114. By the same table, synth-pop runs 110 to 130 and the pop ballad 60 to 80.

The BPM of one song

Soda Pop, the Saja Boys song from KPop Demon Hunters (2025), is listed at 126 BPM in C major (Music Will Jam Zone, October 2026): the dance-pop tempo of the 126-to-130 row. For another title, Bubble Pop Electric included, play it and tap the pad on every beat: six taps give its tempo against pop's range, and the other genres that share it. The BPM counter listens through the microphone instead, and tap tempo clicks your number back. Tunebat lists OsamaSon's Pop, a rap track rather than a pop one, at 161 BPM in G♯ minor (October 2026).

How to make a pop beat

1. Find the tempo from the hook, not the drums: sing it over a click and settle between 95 and 120.
2. Program the kick and clap from the table above, then the hats in eighths; a quiet shaker or tambourine in 16ths adds lift.
3. Loop four chords. I–V–vi–IV (C, G, Am, F) and vi–IV–I–V carry a large share of pop.
4. Hum the hook into Hum to MIDI to get it as notes, or let chords for my melody find the chords under a line you already have.
5. Arrange in blocks of 8 bars: intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, and take the drums out for the bar before the chorus lands.

Then make something of it

The door opens Brumm, a club track with a beat and a bass, with this groove's low end in it. The app runs between 90 and 150 BPM, so a tempo outside goes in at half or double, or at the nearest end when neither fits. No account, no upload: it travels inside the link. Hum a line over it, and it becomes an instrument.

Nothing is recorded: no microphone, only your taps, counted in the browser. The groove's sounds are the app's own samples, fetched when you tap Play. How the site counts visits.