A genre's canonical tempo can be set by the venue it serves, not by musical rule

Miami bass’s canonical ~118 BPM was not a musical given but the outcome of a venue-driven negotiation. Dynamix II’s early tracks sat around 110 BPM, the low-and-slow tempo that suited the skating rinks and teen clubs where David Noller worked, but that felt too slow against the standard 120 BPM those venues otherwise ran at. After ‘much arguing and days of going back and forth’ they settled on 118 BPM as a compromise. The transferable point is that genre tempos are often fixed by the functional needs of a dance floor and its social setting, not by abstract musical reasoning, so knowing where music will be played helps explain why it sits at the tempo it does.

Examples

Dynamix II raised their ~110 BPM skating-rink tempo to 118 BPM as a compromise with the 120 BPM standard of the skating rinks and teen clubs, and that landed as a defining Miami bass tempo.

Assessment

Why was ~110 BPM too slow for Dynamix II’s venues, and how did they resolve it? What does this show about how a genre’s tempo gets set?