Apps that match music to your running pace
Three kinds of app will match music to your running pace today: streaming services built around tempo, BPM-sorted playlists on the big streaming platforms, and analyzers that work on the music files you already own. Which one you want depends almost entirely on where your music lives.
Each kind needs the same number from you first, steps per minute rather than minutes per kilometre; if you do not know yours, measure your running cadence before you compare anything.
What happened to Spotify Running
Spotify Running launched in May 2015. It detected your steps and played music whose tempo matched them.
Spotify discontinued the feature in February 2018. People have been looking for a replacement since; the three approaches below are what they find.
Three ways to get pace-matched music
Streaming services built around tempo. These are subscriptions with their own catalogue, often organised as continuous mixes put together by DJs at fixed tempos. You pick a BPM and the mix follows. RockMyRun is one example of a stream-only subscription service. The trade-off is the catalogue: you run to what they license, not to the songs you already know, and you need a connection or a downloaded mix before you leave the house. The upside is that the mixing is done for you.
BPM-sorted playlists on streaming platforms. Search any large platform for "170 BPM running" and you will find plenty of playlists, and they are free. Three things go wrong. Nobody measured your cadence, so the number in the title is somebody's guess about a typical runner. The tempo tags are frequently off by a factor of two, because the same rhythm can be counted at 85 or at 170 and the tagger picked one; a song tagged 170 may be one you would count at 85. And the songs change the way they do in any playlist: one ends, the next starts cold, and your stride has to find the new beat on its own. The guide on running cadence and song BPM explains why the factor-of-two problem is so common and why it does not have to matter.
Local-library analyzers. The third kind ignores streaming altogether. It reads the audio files on your phone, detects each song's tempo itself, and builds the queue on the device from the songs that fit your cadence. This is where BPM Companion sits.
Here is what it does. Tempo detection happens on the phone with a neural beat tracker that finds every beat and downbeat. It runs in two stages: a quick pass gives every song a rough tempo within seconds so you can start, and a slower pass listens through the whole track once, in the background, and saves the result. You set a cadence by dragging the ring, tapping the disc in rhythm, or pressing and holding the disc and running for ten seconds so the step sensor measures you. The app then selects the songs within ±5 % of that cadence by default; the tolerance is a setting. It also takes songs at half and at double that tempo, because a 90 BPM groove carries a 180 steps-per-minute runner with one beat for every two steps, and it labels each match exact, half-time or double-time so you can see which is which. Songs hand over on a downbeat with a crossfade of about five seconds, and the tempo glides from one song to the next as long as the gap is within roughly 1.23 times; beyond that it falls back to a plain two-second crossfade. Quiet intros and outros that do not hold the tempo are trimmed by default, so a song starts where its groove starts. If nothing in your library matches, a metronome ticks at your cadence until you turn the dial to a tempo that has songs.
The app has no internet permission at all, so there is no account, no upload and no analytics, and it is free. It is on Android now, with iOS in the works, on one engine for every platform.
The honest limitation
A local analyzer cannot touch streaming audio. Streaming services do not let other apps reach the actual sound, and files with DRM on them cannot be read, so no on-device analyzer can measure a song it cannot hear.
So this route is for people who own files: ripped CDs, purchased downloads, Bandcamp purchases, podcasts, and the YouTube rips sitting in many downloads folders. Those rips are usually WebM/Opus files, often saved under a misleading .mp3 name, and BPM Companion reads them as they are, alongside MP3, AAC/M4A, FLAC, OGG/Opus and WAV. If your collection is a decade of streaming likes with nothing downloaded, the first two approaches are the ones open to you.
If you are not sure what tempo your files run at, finding the BPM of your music offline covers the options, including doing it with this app.
How to choose
Four questions settle it.
Do you own your music, or rent it? If your songs are files on a device, a local analyzer gives you your own music at your pace with nothing to pay. If they live only inside a subscription, you are choosing between a tempo-based streaming service and static BPM playlists.
Do you care about privacy and running offline? A local analyzer needs no connection and, in BPM Companion's case, has no network access at all. A streaming service needs connectivity or content downloaded in advance.
Do you want DJ mixes or your own songs? A curated mix at a fixed tempo is a pleasure if you like the music in it. If you would rather hear the songs you chose, in an order built for your stride, that is what a local library gives you.
Android or iOS? BPM Companion is on Android today; the iOS app is in the works. If you run with an iPhone and cannot wait, the streaming approaches are the ones available to you now.
Whichever kind you pick, start from the right number. The cadence pages list which song tempos fit each cadence at exact, half and double time, so you can check a playlist's claims against the arithmetic before you lace up.
If your running music is in files you own, BPM Companion is the third kind of app: it analyzes your library on the phone, matches it to your cadence with half- and double-time included, and hands songs over on the beat, with no internet access and no subscription.