Existing songs remixed to a higher pitch, usually with a faster beat, almost always by fans rather than rights holders. Introduced in 2002 as a trance subgenre and spread across the internet from mid-2005. The record's entry for the edit that eventually became the default way audio travels.
Nightcore is defined by the pitch, not the speed. A sped-up track that stays at its original pitch is something else, and the people who care about this distinction care about it a great deal.
Almost every nightcore track is someone else's song. The genre has essentially no original material, which for twenty years has made it awkward to file and impossible to license.
Logged on a phone speaker on a bus in 2025: a song from that year, pitched up, unlabelled. The listener had no word for what she was playing. The word has existed since 2002.
The sped-up edit did not start on TikTok in 2020. It has a name, a date of 2002, and a decade of forum archives sitting behind it with the still images and the anime cover art intact.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
