There’s no question that social distancing measures have altered our media consumption habits. We are all spending more time with social networks, TikTok, and Tiger King. Overall video streaming has exploded to the point where Netflix and YouTube throttled their speeds and lowered video quality to combat massive surges in European viewership. The one exception seems to be the new “quick bite” streaming service Quibi, which is bucking this trend by stalling after two weeks. The video streaming industry has hit the point of saturation: Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and HBO GO will run you north of $40/month, without including your internet service provider. Sorry Quibi, but I’m not dropping Curb Your Enthusiam for Chrissy’s Court.
It comes as no surprise that music listening has also been altered by our lifestyle changes. Spotify’s blog reported a general increase in “chill” music added to personal playlists last month. Chill songs are identified by low energy, low danceability, and acoustic instrumentation. “Chill” is not a classified genre by most music industry standards, but it is a category under Spotify’s Genre & Moods section. The streaming platform has beefed up its “At Home” category significantly, anchored by celeb-curated playlists such as Cooking Together: Selena Gomez and Gaming Together: Lil Yachty. That being said, the descriptor “chill” could be used to describe a wide range of sounds, from Christine and the Queens new EP La vita nuova to Oasis’ “Wonderwall.”
The music-driven data science company Chartmetric expanded on “chill” with an in-depth analysis of Spotify listening trends as they pertain to genre. While most genres remained relatively unaffected during the initial stages of COVID-19, Classical and Ambient have seen significant growth.
The primary reason for this rise is likely due to the shift to working and studying from home. Instrumental music has no distracting lyrics and can help drown out harsh exterior sounds like traffic, garbage trucks, and the MBTA Green Line trolley screeching by every 15 minutes. It has been well documented that ambient listening can help with focus and information retention. Pressing play on Spotify’s Deep Focus playlist will undoubtedly pair well with work and study, but I can’t say the same thing about 100 Gecs’ “stupid horse.”
A secondary benefit of Classical and Ambient listening is the ability to create a sense of calm. Good ambient music should never feel intrusive, and should simply provide a grounding for reality. In the liner notes for his 1978 album Music for Airports, Brian Eno wrote:
An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres. Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
A tertiary, but quietly significant reason for the rise in instrumental listening is our collective increase in passive music consumption. Spotify, relying largely on algorithms and playlists, offers listeners music recommendations that are most sonically similar to the songs they have previously enjoyed. When I’m neck-deep in a Gaslight Anthem hole on Spotify, the algorithm will eventually suggest “Krystalline” from Alkaline Trio. I’ve never once asked to hear Alkaline Trio, but that song in particular is close enough to Gaslight’s hooky punk rock for it to auto-generate in my playlist. The reasoning behind the algorithmic suggestions is to keep us listening to Spotify and spending more time within the app. Radio is programmed the same way, but instead of zeroing in on personalized tastes, its playlists are formulated with a broader audience in mind.
We have all grown accustomed to this hyper-passive listening through either radio playlisting or algorithms—we don’t choose the songs, but we don’t mind them. In fact, we mentally tune them out after a while. Maybe one song will catch our attention enough to get dragged onto a personal playlist, but for the most part, the music is wallpaper. It exists as a grounding mechanism for the room, and if it’s too intrusive, we will remove it as soon as possible.
If Spotify encourages passive listening, and Ambient music is created for the purpose of passive listening, the pair is inherently complementary—the sonic version of peanut butter and jelly. Everyone wins: Spotify gets our commodified attention, we receive pleasant sounds as we work, and Classical and Ambient artists…well, they get a mixed bag.
Spotify pays out around $0.006 every time a song is streamed, which makes playlist placement critical for an artist’s financial success. Classical and Ambient artists who land on the popular “Focus” and “Chill” playlists, will receive a limited benefit from this exposure. “Limited” is the key word. When a listener is passively consuming music that is intrinsically meant to be half-ignored, they will be less likely to move that track onto a personal playlist, which would result in more repeat listens and more money for the artist.
Further, many of the most popular playlists are updated frequently, shortening a song’s overall lifespan. For example, the “Lo-Fi” playlist (under the Focus category) is followed by over three million listeners and has 446 songs over the course of ten hours. If an artists’ song is at the end of that playlist (or even the middle), most listeners will never hear it, and those who do may be in such deep focus states that they won’t engage with the track enough to save it.
This is the biggest problem with algorithmic music discovery: the songs’ similarities lull us into a state of passive long-term consumption where we cannot distinguish or recall individual tracks or artists. This happens to me every time I marathon Seinfeld on Hulu while scrolling through Twitter: I couldn’t tell you exactly what happened in each episode, but Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer were all there.
To encourage active Ambient music discovery, here are some of my favorite albums and soundtracks to put on whenever I need to get work done.
Stardew Valley
An indie game developed by one person over the course of four years, Stardew Valley has sold over 400 million copies since 2016. The game is premised on eloping to a rural town to escape the hustle of city life, which the soundtrack captures with soothing atmospheres and quirky melodies.
I/O
The Brooklyn-based septet probably classifies more as “Post-Rock” than Ambient, but their use of ambience textures makes their two albums rewarding experiences. Also, the third track of Anyone, Anywhere is “Allston,” and any mention of Boston’s Rock City neighborhood deserves recognition.
Hollow Knight
Another video game, because dungeon-crawler games are perfect for ambient music. The entire purpose of a video game soundtrack is to be present enough to set the tone of your play, but never intrusive enough to interrupt your concentration. I think this is one of the most beautiful soundtracks I’ve ever played along to, and cannot recommend this game enough.