Tempo & rhythm
Beatgrid
A beatgrid is the map your DJ software lays over a track marking where every beat falls. Once it is right, sync, looping and quantise all work; once it is wrong, everything built on top of it is wrong too.
Measured in our catalog
Our analyser reads 443,442 of 443,460 public tracks as 4/4 — and still flags its own tempo reading as uncertain on 71,506 of them, one track in six.
Near-universal 4/4 is what makes automatic gridding work at all: with every bar the same size, one correct downbeat implies the whole grid. The flag is the honest half of the picture — it marks the tracks where the tempo the analyser found sits outside what its genre would predict, which is where a grid is worth checking by hand.
100.0%
Read as 4/4
443,442
Tracks in 4/4
71,506
Tempo flagged uncertain
16.1%
Of tracks with a tempo
Measured on 11 August 2026 across public tracks with a time signature, and public tracks with a detected BPM for the flag share. Method: how we correct half-time BPM detection.
Why it matters
A beatgrid is an analysis result, not a property of the music, and analysis can be wrong. A grid anchored half a beat late will hold two records in perfect sync and still sound drunk, and because the software insists everything is aligned, the last place you look is the grid.
It matters most on anything not made to a click — live drums, older records, edits assembled from other edits. Straight electronic music is where automatic gridding works, and it is also where you are least likely to check.
Frequently asked
What does it mean when a beatgrid is off?+
The software thinks the beat lands somewhere it does not. Sync will still lock the two tracks together, but to the wrong reference, so the mix drifts or sits fractionally behind without ever obviously breaking.
Are all dance tracks in 4/4?+
Nearly all of them. Our analyser reads 443,442 of 443,460 public tracks as 4/4 — 100.0% — which is why counting in bars works across the whole catalog.
Can you trust automatic beatgrids?+
On straight electronic music, usually. We flag our own tempo reading as uncertain on 71,506 tracks, and the pattern behind most of those is not a bad grid but a tempo detected an octave away from how the record is played.
Related terms
Bar
A bar is four beats in 4/4 time — one full cycle of the kick pattern. DJs count in bars rather than seconds because a bar is the same length of music at any tempo, and seconds are not.
BPM
BPM — beats per minute — counts how many beats land in sixty seconds. It is the first number a DJ checks, because two tracks have to agree on tempo before anything else about them matters.
Four-on-the-floor
Four-on-the-floor is a kick drum on every beat of the bar. It is the rhythmic base of house, techno and trance, and it is the reason those genres mix into each other so easily.
Time signature
A time signature says how many beats are in a bar and which note value counts as a beat. Dance music is almost entirely 4/4 — four quarter-note beats to the bar, every bar.