Nightcore is a style of Electronic Music, in particular, a style of making music remixes where the song's pitch is altered (often to a major key) and the track is sped up to double the original BPM. Beats are made louder, and other edits are made, such as adding various digital effects and even manipulating specific parts or frequencies ("stems") to give the music a more "produced" sound, but the core element here is the speeding up. Tracks are usually varied in quality, from well-composed, professional-sounding remixes to crappily sped-up songs with vocals that sound as if the singer had inhaled helium. There is also a unique type of Nightcore that is called switching vocals. There is 2 or more vocals mixed together with amazing effects. You can find many of these videos on YouTube (example video
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It's more of a phenomenon than a genre of its own, with origins in the early Hardcore Techno movement, in fact, "Nightcore" is the name of a Norwegian DJ duo comprised of Thomas Nilsen and Steffen Ojala Søderholm, who began releasing sped-up versions of trance, techno, and early Eurodance songs in 2001. Influenced by pitch-shifted vocals in German group Scooter's songs "Nessaja" and "Ramp! (The Logical Song)", the duo set out to promote their sped-up brand of dance music as an even happier form of happy hardcore, with many other DJs and amateur music producers quickly following suit.
Early nightcore edits were primarily limited to rave music such as trance, techno, and various strains of Eurodance, and then branching out to sped-up remixes or techno remakes of popular songs, before further expanding into user-created edits of pop and rock songs to the point that the rem "nightcore" become a catch-all term for any song that is sped up, which has become a source of Broken Base among fans of the style, as in such case, it's technically inaccurate —simply speeding up a song without remixing it doesn't make it a "true" nightcore remix, with many YouTube content owners and practicing music producers calling out the uploaders on this (see below).
In terms of views, many nightcore remixes have more views than the traditional songs, but this doesn't necessarily mean the song has been Eclipsed by the Remix.
As time progressed, the term Nightcore has been widespread among various communities and groups, but for negative reasons. Music enthusiasts, artists, video game players, and music game players are the ones who hate this kind of phenomenon due to its usage in YouTube and its effortless and unethical monetization. Nightcore uploaders would rip music off of popular songs, use a free program such as Audacity to speed up the song and pitch, save an anime girl image off of Google and save the photo as a video, and upload to YouTube, calling it a remix or nightcore version, while often times not crediting the artist of both the music and the anime girl image. All at the same time, they would monetize the video. The process would take less than 5 minutes to do. With YouTube having heavier restrictions on copyrighted material (i.e. a music game tournament video getting flagged for having a sound sample of a song), its system does not exactly apply to material that has been sped and pitched up. It is indeed possible for some nightcore tracks to get more hits than the original track itself, upsetting the original artists and supporters. For searchers who want to hear a cover or remix version of a track, seeing nightcore labeled as a top search over actual remixers or composers is also insulting.
But despite nightcore's acquired negative reputation, its influence remains strong within contemporary Electronic Music, particularly in the hardcore and rave techno scenes, where producers have taken the nightcore formula and made their own edits of popular rave tracks from the ground up. One such successful attempt at "true" nightcore was Japanese label EXIT TUNES' long-running series of "speed trance" compilation albums, featuring professionally made nightcore-style remixes of popular anime soundtracks. Advancements in DAW software, particularly the ability to deconstruct tracks into their constituent "stems" have enabled DJs to craft more convincing rave-friendly remixes of popular songs, with or without the pitching-up commonly associated with the style. With the rise of 2000s nostalgia and a growing hard dance revival, there are signs that the nightcore phenomenon might experience a return to form.
