lo-fi study beats

Is this not just downtempo?

its just totally functional music. i dont mind it. especially right now, this is actually something i appreciate.

Easy listening boom bap otm
No mention yet of not only the music being extremely similar from artist to artist but also the artwork?

boombient

i prefer the meditation and healing tones for chakra balancing and pineal gland cleansin tbh. but there's a similarity in principle i think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5dPe0yb4JQ

oh yeah

this stuff all comes up next to each other thru the algos

No mention yet of not only the music being extremely similar from artist to artist but also the artwork?

Yeah when 'lo-fi' came into vogue it also seemed heavily associated with anime artwork & video game streams

also playing-in-another-roomcore

xxp yeah that's the thing.

one thing you can do is avoid anything with anime looking art...per xps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WhUkxMKhrI

jut another extension of all the 'sad' music the past decade i think

the lo fi thing is a bit weird to me, as its not esp dirty, its just a bit under produced, and the textures are mostly on the more delicate side

shame that i cant see any track names on this youtube feed im listening to right now (while working ofc)

Yeah i don’t know why it’s called lo-fi really

though vinyl surface noise is often added onto it. I could be wrong but it seems like a trope with this stuff

xxp

Sometimes there is some static but not usually

that popular stream has the track names in the video, along the top. And you can scroll back for hours on YouTube. Fill your boots!

well i need a nap

"Lo-fi" was never apt and is a dumb name, although there's a strain of it that's built mostly on samples, maybe it's just supposed to be hazy sounding in comparison to trap beats. Boom bap vaporwave.

insomnia by team astro is so much like a classic R&B/hip hop beat but i cant put my finger on it.

whos the dilla or madlib of this genre though? :P

the only act i can recall is Mt Marcy. They seem like a pretty good example of the style

tbh i totally love these smoove sadboy beats. does exactly what it is meant to. i value modest ambition and consistent execution. waiting for the dj premier of this genre to emerge.

Reposting from the other thread, a track from Youtube video game montage that I liked enough to dig around and find again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHtBIIIF3Do

Also relevant, drummers making lo-fi beats to shred over:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57MwDfN8IYc

oh it's not hard to find artists with a lot more listeners than them on Spotify. the big YouTube stream has playlists there, the account is called ChilledCow

xxp

On My Way by Blumen is a good, if very typical one.

"music media socialite adam neely called this stuff "smooth jazz for millennials" and i think that's just about accurate."

empty shelves by team astro actually IS smooth jazz!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk8Fl3A4-no

found this on a lo-fi spotify playlist. love it.

I just listened to around 15 seconds of the pirate ship in a storm and damn near fell asleep. How was I not aware of these before?

There are some old chalet houses on the coast near here and all I really want is a book, a bottle of red wine, a fire and a storm and I could be happy forever.

It seems like in the late 90s / 2000s, this kind of music had to work in both a club and a hotel lobby (e.g., Mushroom Jazz), and started to horn in on Muzak and Smooth Jazz as default background music. Now that public spaces are mostly closed, it makes sense that they're turning into 100% study beats.

Hippo Dreams showed up on my Spotify somehow, and if I basically need some sound in the room while working on something, rather than dead silence and Covid dread, it works well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO00_Svyusk

playing-in-another-roomcore

I've been thinking for a while about starting a thread around "'Distraction' as a productive mode of listening," but haven't thought through how to talk about the idea (or even searched to see if the thread already exists).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BO49r6xX1M

lol

i think the minimally animated graphics are almost as hypnotic as the movement -- some anime person with headphones nodding their head, often shown writing near a window that looks out onto city lights

I love the animations yeah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lkc5Woyy47I

i can’t bring myself to be cynical about this trend, i kinda just love that kids are into ambient

blunted beats, trip hop, jazz fudge, dj cam, pork recordings...

how much of this stuff could be released on Giegling or something if you replaced the hip hop beats with mnml house beats?

“this stuff” = lofi study beats not the list in my first graf

This genre is not worth getting fuzzy about. Not worth getting excited about either. You could do worse for background music.

no wait let’s analyze the fuck out of it!

I also think there's something about the fact that most huge trap anthems these days are still like one hazy sample or a single soft synth sound + huge distorted 808s. It feels like both strains have some dna from early '10s underground producers.

i can’t bring myself to be cynical about this trend, i kinda just love that kids are into ambient

I think I also like that "music to study to" is an actual popular genre. Based on the first few tracks on a Youtube channel of this that I just tuned into, I kind of like this stuff for what it is and would listen to it before a lot of other popular things. It's calming and pleasant. Both parts of "smooth jazz for millennials" seem wrong to me tbh.

All I actually needed at this moment was something to calm my nerves and I'm almost embarrassed by how well this worked for that. I might pass out if I leave it on for too long, though. This is the channel btw:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NOSDKb0HlU

Moving on now

My 10-year-old loves to listen to Spotify playlists of this while doing homework. What I don't get is, who makes it? When I try to google the bands and tracks I basically just get links to other playlists, never an actual homepage for the band or music-press writeups or.... Who is Aaarly? Who is Obie Hans? Is there just some big factory where one person makes a bunch of these beats and then assigns artist and track names at random?

I just Googled the artist they were playing on that channel just now (Leavv - "Flushing the Stairs"). Guy has a full-length album and uses male pronouns and identifies as a producer at least: https://chillhop.bandcamp.com/album/tales-of-a-flowing-forest

He also has an Instagram page and a dog: https://www.instagram.com/leavv_/

Afaik ChilledCow is the most popular channel, it’s its own label at this point. They’re not anonymous from what I can tell looking at their spotify playlists (eg: https://open.spotify.com/user/chilledcow/playlist/0vvXsWCC9xrXsKd4FyS8kM ) however most of them have what looks like japanese names and are actually not japanese ( or at least the 3 artists from the list I checked - Ky Akasha, Yasumu and Kupla all looked non-Asian).

I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the songs are made by a computer that is just fed loops and beats. Wasn’t there already some AI developed that could make unlimited music from stems? I remember a site with Jai Paul’s Jasmine that did this.

i can't imagine studying to this stuff personally