Spotify’s Running Mode Asks You to Set a Tempo. Its Default Is 150 BPM.

Spotify’s new Running Mode asks for one number before it plays anything, and the figure sitting inside its default interval workout is 150 beats per minute. That sits below the rate at which most runners turn their legs over, and it is worth understanding before accepting it.

The feature reached Premium subscribers on iOS on Thursday in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden. Spotify’s announcement describes 25 curated presets adjustable by workout type, duration, beats per minute, and genre, with optional spoken cues available in English only. Android has no announced date.

Two details in the announcement do not survive contact with the app. Spotify lists the workout types as “interval, steady, or pyramid” and places Running Mode inside the Fitness Hub it opened in April. Techlicious, the only outlet to have run the feature rather than the press release, found five workout types (Just Run, Easy Run, Interval Run, Pyramid Run, Long Run), four genres (pop, hip hop, EDM, rock), and no Running Mode in the Fitness Hub. Reaching it meant searching the app by name.

What the Number Actually Controls

The mechanism explains the confusion. Running Mode runs on Prompted Playlists, Spotify’s text-to-playlist tool, and Spotify exposes the written instruction behind each preset. Techlicious published the prompt for the Interval Run pop preset in full: “I am going for a run. Build me a playlist of music to accompany and guide me. Make the music choice random based on what’s popular on Spotify, but make it Pop. I want to run for 30 minutes. Make it an interval run. The tempo should be around 150 BPM, matched to my running pace.”

The final clause is the one runners should notice. Musical beats per minute and footstrikes per minute match only if you land on every beat, and Spotify’s instruction treats 150 BPM as equivalent to a running pace. The confusion has already spread. Stuff described the setting as “the target heart rate beats per minute.” The field controls the tempo of the music, nothing else.

What the Research Says About Tempo

The underlying idea has real support. In a 2015 study in Sports Medicine – Open, Edith Van Dyck and colleagues at Ghent University had 16 recreational runners complete repeated 800m efforts while the music tempo was shifted between 1 and 3 percent above or below each runner’s measured cadence, staying under the roughly 4 percent change an average listener can consciously detect. Cadence followed the music (p < .001).

The same group later tested what happens when runners are told to match the beat. In a 2021 paper in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 33 recreational runners ran four-minute efforts in silence and with music. Left alone, 33 percent entrained to the beat. Instructed to match it, 57 percent did. The instruction worked, and it carried a cost: runners told to match the tempo ran at lower speeds with shorter steps than runners given no such instruction. Running Mode is instructed entrainment by design, which is the version that tightens cadence and slows the runner down.

Where to Set It

That returns the question to the number. The 180 steps-per-minute figure that circulates in running culture comes from Jack Daniels, who counted stride rates with his wife at the 1984 Olympics and found that of roughly 47 athletes observed, only one took fewer than 180 steps per minute. Those were Olympians racing. Daniels has also written that no beginner he has coached has ever matched that rate, and that runners tend to use the least energy at whatever frequency they have settled into on their own.

His own numbers complicate Spotify’s premise more directly. Daniels timed elite runners at 7:00, 6:00, and 5:00 mile pace and recorded average stride rates of 184, 186, and 190. Speed rose roughly 40 percent across that range while stride rate rose 3.2 percent. Runners get faster mainly by lengthening the stride rather than by turning over quicker. A tempo setting can move your cadence, but it will not make you faster on its own.

Measure before choosing. Count your steps for 30 seconds at an easy effort, double the figure, and set the BPM there or slightly above rather than accepting the preset. If your natural cadence sits at 165, a 150 setting is asking you to slow your legs down. Runners working on raising cadence have the clearest use for it, and our own high BPM song list covers the same ground without a subscription.

What Running Mode will not do is follow you. Spotify built exactly that in 2015, using phone sensors to read a runner’s pace and select music to match, and retired it on Feb. 26, 2018. Strava removed its own Spotify integration from the Record screen earlier this year, leaving fewer options than a decade ago.

The prompt holding that BPM figure can be read on the phone but changed only in Spotify’s web player, according to Techlicious.