How Anime-Inspired Lo-fi Music Because a Worldwide Phenomena Posted Aug 30, 2020
As an avid anime fan, you would have spotted it on YouTube. A video of an anime girl contently focussed into her notebook. Or, perhaps she’s reading a newspaper with a cup of coffee in her hand or snuggled in bed with a fat cat next to her. These are the covers of the popular genre of lo-fi music growing popular among millennials. There are also other names for it, including “focus music”, “study music” and “chill pop”.
There are many theories on how these lo-fi music became affiliated with anime. One states that this genre of music may have come from the nostalgic trance of watching Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim and Toonami in the evening where mellow music was commonly played in the background, rather than the usual colourful, bouncy music of more comical anime. Today, the aim of such music is to allow the listener to calm down and concentrate onto their tasks, probably part of the growing wave of New Age beliefs in the likes of meditation and yoga.
Some of the most popular YouTube channels live streaming this music as garnered close to 7 million subscribers over the years. These include users known as ChilledCow and Feardog. Based on an interview with an owner of a lo-fi YouTube channel, Ryan Celsius, owning a live streaming channel with lo-fi study music doesn’t come cheap. It requires a certain among of work to put together the audio and video until they flow mercifully together. Then the hardware of up to $300 a month must be taken into account. After YouTube takes their cut from the advertising revenue, plus the additional amount of earnings from Patreon, the monthly profit stands around $5,000 a month, and growing.
Others, having realized this trend early on, and have created their own record label. Jonny Laxton and Luke Pritchard, both from the UK, have turned their online radio into a lucrative business accepting music submission from local artists to showcase in their playlists. In fact, there are times when artists would inquire about paying extra money to have their songs be featured in more rotations and thus, generating more traction to the artist. This makes sense though, as the demand for chilled out music becomes more profitable.
Today, lo-fi music has also been leaked into mainstream music too. In fact, the majority of hip hop music today are inspired by this growing lo-fi trend, from Drake’s Passionfruit to XXXTentacion’s SAD!. Lately, other genres have been mixed and experimental into it too to give it an exotic flavour, such as Reggaeton. According to music and technology expert, DJ Jesse Neo, he has also witnessed a growing trend of this particular kind of beats being more prevalent on his marketplace website.
Right now, we can only see how long this new trend of music will last. Online monetization is the backbone of everything that goes on in the digital world, and if listeners continue to demand for such music, the hours of lo-fi music will continue, not just for during times of studying, but also as we go on with our daily lives.
