How Did Pop Music Get So Slow?

In 2014, the DJ and producer Dave Audé – a Grammy winner whose remixes of pop hits have been club staples for more than a decade – caught a festival set by the young Norwegian producer Kygo, who had just signed to Ultra/RCA two months earlier. Kygo ignored the peppy tempos typical of mainstream dance music, choosing to focus instead on slow tracks; in the past, this might have sent everyone to the beer lines, but listeners at Colorado's Global Dance Festival took to his music