I was listening to White Iverson by Post Malone:
and when I looked up its bpm here and here I found that the bpm was 130 which caught me by surprise because the song sounds slow. So I'm wondering if one can see it as 130/2 bpm, or how does one figure it's 130? Do slow songs sometimes have a high bpm and if so for what reason?
Ultimately, what the BPM is judged to be depends on what a person's perception of what the 'beat' actually is - so it's somewhat subjective, and not entirely objective.
For a given time signature, there is a wide variety of different possible drum patterns. For example, for 4/4, some of drum patterns might have a bass drum on beat 1 & 3, while some might have a bass drum on all 4 beats (four-to-the-floor). Other patterns might have busier bass drums patterns, with hits on eights or even 16th upbeats. At some point, these might affect the perception of what the BPM is.
The song may even have been sequenced at 130 BPM in the sequencer - perhaps, as you say, to get more resolution for the more detailed elements. In isolation, I am still reasonably confident that the song would normally be thought of by most musicians as about 65 BPM in 4/4.
As per replete's comment, DJs might be most interested in how to mix a song into a set at a typical dance tempo. So a website oriented towards DJs might list a song at double the tempo that it would most usually be perceived to be.
yeah but those two websites aren't mixing anything. they're just saying what the bpm is of that song
Well, yes and no. Any site listing BPMs is going to be aware that a large part of its readership will be DJs. The second site (tunebat) has "Recommendations for Harmonic Mixing" on the page, so it is definitely targeted towards DJs.
Also - some of these sites aren't very clear where they source their information from, and it's quite possible that a bit of data on one site could propagate to multiple other sites without being re-assessed at any point. Most of us will have noticed that the same dodgy lyric transcriptions are available at more than one site, for the same reason!
I think it's the accent beat that sets the pace and gives it the slow cadence.
I found this to be the case with 'The Sky is Crying" by Gary B.B. Coleman. It sounds as slow as 'Stormy Monday' (60 BPM) but when you play it on a platform such as Chordify it registers as 132 BPM. The accent is on the first beat then 23 123 tap-23 123 tap. I used a stopwatch to verify and sure enough 133 BPM.
If you perceive a song as 'slow' you're saying it has a low BPM. Someone else may hear the same song and feel two counts to your one. You're counting 'One and two and three and four and' but they're counting 'One two three four One two three four'. Their BPM will be twice yours.
Neither of you is 'wrong'. The sites you quote both have the 'fast' opinion.
I agree with you - I hear that song as slow. But that's a musician's view. I suspect that in the DJ world it might be useful and customary to 'double up' slow BPM figures. A song will meld very nicely with one at exactly half or double its BPM. So there's no practical dispute here.
I agree with many of the people who had previously posted here; there is no right or wrong answer regarding tracks showing double the BPMs as thought to be. I have many slow (ballads) tracks in my collection that, in my opinion, are approximately half the BPMs indicated by the DJ software that I use. Every DJ has his/her own preference in organizing their tracks. There is no right or wrong way, as long as he/she can manage them. A suggestion: If you get confused on whether a track is "actually" fast or slow, most DJ software allows you to write in the comment section of the track (if necessary).
