Hi! My name is Peter, I live in Sweden and I collect music for jogging/running with a verifiable BPM to SPM correlation. Lace up your shoes because this is my web page about it to help get you started too. I used to have the largest such music collection in the World, now it's just the best!

BPM = Beats Per Minute.
SPM = Steps Per Minute.

I've been using this kind of music as a motivational and physiological aid for running since back in the Nineties. I don't remember exactly when I first discovered the relation between music's beats per minute and running's steps per minute, because initially I thought about it mostly as a curiosity, but I do remember how. It was back when I used to jog with a so called walkman (that's a portable cassette player FYI internet youngsters) and played around with various mixtapes. One day, purely by accident, four or five such songs matching my current leisure cadence came on in a row and by the third or fourth I noticed that pattern. When it ended I rewinded and played/jogged them again, making a mental note to use that particular mixtape and that particular sequence of songs more often.

Another person who must have had a similar experience is Bob Marcus over in Utah, check out his site jogtunes, an even more advanced list with download options via iTunes and a free podcast to go.

Finding new suitable music was much harder back then, hence collecting initially didn't really became an obsession apart from sometimes noting on the fly-by that a song on the airwaves would probably work, adding it to a mixtape first chance I got. But scarcity years aside, things really took off back in 2006 when I posted my list of approx two hundred self-verified such songs on my homepage (and some online running forums) hoping to connect with others with similar collections and lists, aiming to expand my own, thereby adding more variety to my BPM-aided training.

I might have been a bit lax on following my own adding criterias below back early on when finding a new correlated running song still felt like a rare occasion but it worked beyond expectations and until recently I might have had the largest such collection in the world! Four thousand songs (well, almost)! That was fun, but it got out of hand (quantity over quality) and frankly I finally got a little tired of the hoarding aspect.

Back in 2006 or 2007 I also found a nice little computer program called MixMeister that made the first part of the evaluating process much more effective. When open it calculates the BPM of every song I drop on it, hence quickly hinting me whether or not I should add it to the try-out folder on my mp3-player. I can't praise that program enough, best digital aid I've ever had.

That said, everything listed on this page has always been personally in-shoes verified for ear-to-legs correlation. My current modus operandi goes like this: I think of it as a 1-5 rating process where 1 are songs that never make it past first listen, 2 are songs that survived first test but never makes the list, 3 are the majority, good songs that make the full list after being tried five times without really standing out in comparison to the best (hence, also, sometimes songs in this category gets dropped later due to fading in sort of a longer running test-of-time factor side-to-side with their cadence peers), 4 are those that make it quickly because they're that good and 5 are those rare ones that are so good that they get the thumbs-up gif beside them (though, over time, those might be subject to change too, and for the same reason).

For an expansion of the concept behind the whole thing, why it works (or why I think it works), you can read my footnote on it here

As for cover songs versus originals: The short version is that I list the version of a song that my feet like the best no matter whether it's a cover or an original. The somewhat longer version is that there's no possible one-size-fits-all policy on that subject. My own favourite cover here is in the upper cadences, but the original is slower than 150 steps per minute and never made it on in the first place (a disco classic turned speed metal, totally different genre after the switcharoo and really cool move on the cover bands part. So those two factors cover (no pun intended) most decision made on what versions to keep or not to keep, cadence variations and genre switches, but add production quality to that and the number of branches on the decision tree quickly starts to rise exponentially

Also there the problem that if I keep too many cover versions of a song it might start to unnecessarily bore me by over-repetition, because remember we're talking about pretty much static drum patterns here any witch way for all songs on the list, much of which can barely be said to have reached the threshold of originality in the first place. And if a song on the list is a cover but NOT marked as such it is because I didn't know that it was a cover when added, so feel free to drop me a note about that, especially if the drums and rhythm of the original has even better support for our mutual through-ears-to-feet coordinated jogging needs.

UPDATE INFO 2026-MAY-03: Three old out, three new in, can't decide to go for 1000 best of the best or back to aiming for 1609 in total, probably the former, but I'm not sure.

160 SPM - Anne Bloom - Fallen angel
160 SPM - Anne Bloom - Winter
174 SPM - Bryan Adams - Sometimes you lose before you win

UPDATE INFO 2026-APRIL-10: Paul Post - more 80s hard rock hair metal than the real thing - I might have added the whole album if the drums hade worked for my feet on more than one track.

150 SPM - Spencer Thomas - The world is fucked and I love you
152 SPM - Paul Post - No turning back
154 SPM - Nergil & Reevoke - Dream feeling
161 SPM - Fake A Smile - Snow White
162 SPM - Angus McSix - Starlight stronghold