Tempo is the overall speed of a piece of music, while a beat is a single pulse within it. Think of tempo as the setting on a metronome and the beat as each individual tick it produces.
The core difference
Tempo is the speed at which music moves; a beat is one repeating pulse within that speed.
- tempo — the speed at which a piece of music is played, or the pace that sets that speed: the conductor picked up the tempo for the final movement.
- beat — a regular rhythmic pulse, especially in music: the bassline laid down a steady beat.
How to tell them apart
A simple way to separate them is to picture a metronome. The dial you set to fast or slow controls the tempo, and each individual tick it makes is a beat. Change the tempo and the beats come faster or slower, but they are still beats either way.
The words drift outside music too, which is where confusion creeps in. Tempo can describe the pace of an activity, such as a team needing to raise the tempo of a game, while beat has its own separate meanings entirely, from a journalist's regular patrol area to being informally exhausted, as in feeling beat after a long shift. Those senses have nothing to do with music, so context matters.
