Power Songs: The Songs That Actually Make You Run Faster

I've always known that certain songs are just guaranteed to provide a "lift" in my pace when they come on. Recently it's been just about anything by Olivia Rodrigo, but once in a while a classic will drop on a playlist and I'll be off. And that's always just been a feeling, something I knew inside. But since starting TrackTunes, I've wondered: if I actually look at the numbers, does this hold up?

So that's why I've introduced Power Songs. It's one of the newest features in TrackTunes; it finds the songs that you genuinely run and ride faster to; not just the ones that you listen to the most, but ones that actually move the needle!

"Most played" is not "makes you fast"

Here's the thing: if you just rank songs by average pace, the results get muddy. A song you happened to listen to while on a flat with a tailwind tempo day pops right to the top. The one you listened to on a hilly recovery jog looks like it slows you down. You'd be rewarding terrain and weather, not music.

A little while back I published a big analysis of the songs that correlate with the fastest pace across thousands of runners. That's a fun, global, "what does the crowd run fast to" view. Power Songs is the opposite: it's personal, and it goes out of its way to make the comparison fair to you.

The trick: compare each song to the rest of the same run

Your songs, ranked by how much they lift your pace above the rest of the same activity.

Instead of comparing a song to some global average, Power Songs compares it to the rest within that same activity. On any given activity, TrackTunes looks at how fast you were during a song versus your average pace across the whole activity. If a song causes you to speed up relative to the rest of that workout, it ranks higher. Drift slower, and it doesn't.

This approach substantially reduces the influence of external factors from activity to activity. Hilly day? The whole run is tough! So the baseline is slow too; the song is judged against that. Terrain, weather, long-term fitness drift all sort of wash out.

No one-hit wonders

The other half of this is repetition. One lucky downhill shouldn't be allowed to crown a power song forever. So in the current methodology, a track needs to show up in at least three separate activities before it qualifies. If a song consistently affects your pace across three, five, ten different days, then it's real!

The result is a ranked list; songs with the biggest impact appear first. For runs, each song shows the pace it shaves off. Something like -0:14 /mi. For rides, it's speed added, like +0.8 mph. It works for both running and cycling, with a toggle to switch between them.

The cadence pocket

There's one more thing that I personally love and am completely attached to; which is cadence/bpm matching. For runs, Power Songs also flags which of your power songs sit in your cadence pocket. So songs where the tempo lines up with your stride. If you've read about the Rhythm Section and finding your BPM sweet spot, this can be the payoff: it's cool to see that the songs you speed up to are frequently the ones your feet lock onto.

The more you run, the sharper it gets

Because Power Songs leans on repetition and within-activity comparison, it gets better with more data. Everyone sees their headline insight and their top power songs as soon as one qualifies (three activities), and the full ranked list opens up as you keep syncing your workouts. So if you don't see anything yet, log a few more activities with that favorite playlist or artist and see what happens!

Happy running 🎵🏃