- in Production by Bobby Owsinski
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The Tempo Police May Be Coming For You Soon
People, and governments, get upset at the strangest things. With AI music and deep fakes raging, Chechnya has taken silliness to a new level by placing limits on musical tempo. Yes, there really will be a tempo police making sure that songs are at just the right speed for the country.
From now on, “all musical, vocal and choreographic works” will be subject to the new limits of between 80 to 116 beats per minute (BPM), according to the Chechnya Cultural Ministry!
This means that most Western hits will be outside of these limits, which was maybe the point of the law in the first place.
In a Telegram post, the Minister of Culture stated that the mandate is because, ““We must bring to the people and to the future of our children the cultural heritage of the Chechen people.” In other words, they felt that there was too much foreign influence seeping into the country’s music. Lot’s of other countries feel that way as well, but have managed it well by making sure that a certain percentage of airplay is always set aside their own artists, and that’s worked. Chechnya new instructions are more than a little extreme though.
What’s interesting is that the country is a Russian republic, but at 76BPM the Russian national anthem is too slow to make the cut. Let’s see how that plays out on May Day.
It’s unclear how the Ministry will enforce this mandate, and if there will in fact be a “tempo police.” Mostly likely Chechnya’s radio stations will have to comply, and you probably won’t hear anything up tempo in public, but unless they outright ban Spotify and other streaming service, tempos will run wild and free on a personal level.
How likely is this to be adopted worldwide? Probably near zero, but then again, all it takes is one country to set a precedent.
