How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

Lofi Hip Hop is an immensely popular style of music that exploded organically online beginning in the mid 2010s. But like all things in music, when too many folks jump on the bandwagon, it starts to slow down.

Like an old-fashioned highway robbery, once the bandwagon slows enough, it’s ripe for pillaging — in this case, by bloated corporations slinging AI-generated slop and stock music.

Lofi tracks dominate YouTube livestreams and Spotify playlists for listeners of all ages. They’ve been heralded as a cure-all for unfocused students and workers looking to boost their productivity. Lofi has become a mainstay in households and headphones around the world.

But it’s also a critical vein of support for independent musicians.

Lofi created unprecedented opportunity for bedroom musicians and music producers. Its streamlined format and accessible sound offered a stark contrast to the hyper polished pop and dance music that had dominated the 2000s and 2010s.

The Lofi style itself is nothing new, Lofi beats bear a striking resemblance to instrumental hip hop of the 90s and 2000s.

How a late night cartoon planted the seeds of Lofi Hip Hop

The 2004 anime Samurai Champloo, was the first exposure many young musicians had to instrumental hip hop beats. For Japanese soundtrack producer Nujabes, the “lofi” sound wasn’t an aesthetic choice. It was an artifact of creating such forward thinking music with the dusty equipment from 20 years ago.

With today’s music technology, creating a pristine polished beat is much easier. In contrast, Lofi musicians take inspiration from Nujabes’ recordings by deliberately dirtying up their beats and productions, as if they were created on the limited hardware of bygone days.

As listeners began to burn out from the hard-hitting EDM of the Dubstep era, Lofi Hip Hop became the perfect respite: A chilled out, upbeat style of music roughly half the tempo of the dance music that preceded it.

Suddenly, you didn’t have to have hyper polished vocals, impeccable recordings, or meticulously edited synth lines to create a song that would attract thousands or millions of listeners.

Bedroom producers now had an advantage.

They could play whatever instrument they knew, set it to a mellow drum beat, and surround it with a modest production. Add a dose of vinyl noise or a foley track recorded outside their apartment, and voila, you had a lofi hip hop track.

YouTube channels like Chilled Cow, later rebranded Lofi Girl, began cropping up online. Albums like Zelda & Chill ushered in a wave of Lofi cover songs. But as more and more people began to gravitate to the Lofi sound, streaming platforms themselves wanted in on the action

Enter Corporate Interests and Artificial Intelligence

If you haven’t read the incredible exposé “The Ghosts In The Machine” by Liz Pelly, it’s an in-depth investigation of the nefarious efforts of Spotify to dilute its royalty pool for the sake of profit.

By flooding its once converted editorial playlists with hastily-assembled royalty-free music and AI generated slop, Spotify was able to quietly displace real artists to make more money for itself. According to Pelly, Spotify targeted a number of passively-consumed genres, including Lofi, to quietly replace with lower cost music.

If you look at these key playlists like “Lofi Beats,” which boasts over 5 million saves, you’ll notice a huge percentage of artists have no bio, generic artwork, and forgettable songs.

For an old musician like myself, the whole thing gives me flashbacks to the commercialization of punk rock in the 80s, or hip hop in the 90s. A thriving, underground scene mined and refined for industry profit.

But as most punk rockers and rap artists will tell you, once your sound hits the mainstream it’s time to move on.

So what happens when the Lofi Girl graduates?

What’s the hardworking lofi musician to do, now that the once comforting boom bap beats have sold out? One artist from Los Angeles, Emily Davidson, known online as Wish on the Beat, has pivoted to creating ambient versions of her previous lofi beats. And it’s working.

A classically trained cellist, Emily began producing beats as a hobby that quickly became a source of income for her. Wish on the Beat has a catalog of over 50 lofi tracks, many with over a million streams.

Her latest album, Acoustic Ambience 2, features 20 tracks lifted from her catalog of lofi beats. These new “mellow mixes” are re-engineered productions that omit the beat and accentuate the instrumental recordings that made her beats so special in the first place.

The mellow mixes sound markedly different, but retain their calm and focused quality. Acoustic Ambience serves the same purpose as lofi beats. It’s a focus-setting background instrumental, with a refreshing sound that’s all her own.

“I love pop music and hip hop, so I think I’ll always be making beats of some kind,” says Emily, “ These ambient tracks gave me the opportunity to use my recordings in a new context and really showcase what I can do on all my instruments. They’re a lot of fun.”

While AI music generators are a dime a dozen these days, there’s one thing it can’t do: create a new sound. AI depends on previously created music to render its sound-alikes. More than ever, a real recording from a trained musician speaks volumes.

While many musicians are understandably concerned about the rise of AI and the dilution of Spotify’s once great editorial playlists, projects like Wish on the Beat demonstrate there is a way to cut through the noise.

For us listeners, it’s more important than ever to seek out real artists.

We can support musicians we like by adding them to our personal playlists and playing their music every day.

Stock music and AI slop have infiltrated Lofi Hip Hop like weeds in a garden. They only thrive because we depend on platforms like Spotify to curate for us. We can pull up the weeds by creating our own playlists of real artists we want to support.

Many artists have created their own discography playlists that will play all of their songs before allowing the music app to play something else. Turning on one of these playlists can be a huge help to an independent artist. To get you started, here are Spotify discography playlists for Wish on the Beat, GameChops, Coffee Date, and Dj Cutman.

Creating our own playlists and following those created by the musicians themselves can have a real impact, supporting our favorite artists and growing us a more beautiful garden of music to enjoy.