Insufficient Funds: SlowitUp

Insufficient Funds is a weekly post in which we feature a free, or very close to it, piece of media that you can enjoy without overdrafting your bank account. So if you're low on funds, stay tuned to Cerebral Pop every Friday morning.

Update: Apparently the site has vanished. I'm curious if it is a legal issue with the copyrighted music, despite it being slowed down drastically and thus not at all like the originals. Either way, we'll have to wait and see it it ever comes back up.

Internet memes are fickle and tend to disappear as soon as they gain a mainstream audience. At the beginning of this week, someone posted a Justin Bieber song that was slowed down 800%, on a music-sharing site called SoundCloud. All of a sudden it had taken the Internet by storm, mostly because, unlike Justin Bieber at normal speed, it sounded amazing.

While the initial posting almost immediately had a mainstream audience, many seemed to stop paying attention at that point, but the song set off the imaginations of a slew of other people. A whole community sprung up around feeding different songs into a program called PaulStretch and seeing what came out on the other side, and a website called SlowitUp was formed to keep track of them all.

This trend certainly won't appeal to everyone, but all week long I've been enjoying the site as a hub for instant background music while writing or editing articles. Since a three and a half minute song becomes an over 20 minute song, it easily provides hours of music without having to think. If you need some ambient sounds to fill in the silence of a menial task, check out the site, and give the original J. Biebz song a listen below, even if reading that sentence made you throw-up a little in your mouth. I guarantee it is better than his regular speed music by at least 800%.

J. BIEBZ - U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis