lo-fi music

lo-fi music, genre of music production in which a recording is intentionally rendered to include imperfections, such as harmonic distortion, background noise, or other anomalous sounds. Such irregularities are normally filtered out of professional recordings, since they generally are undesirable. However, some artists have embraced the limitations of low-quality recording, leveraging imperfections as an artistic choice. The term lo-fi is derived from low fidelity, wherein fidelity refers to sound quality.

The lo-fi genre has its origins in the rock music industry, the Beach Boys being one of the first bands to employ lo-fi elements. In the 1960s the Beach Boys distorted the sounds of cassette tapes and included a so-called tape hiss in their recordings. These effects were largely the result of recording in a home studio set up by lead singer-bassist-producer Brian Wilson. In the late 1970s and the ’80s increasing numbers of musical artists and bands began to record and release music independently rather than via major record labels, resulting in lo-fi music production. In the 1990s, with the emergence of indie rock and grunge, lo-fi elements were adapted to create a grittier and rawer sound than that of pop rock music. The following decade, singer-songwriter Beck and the American rock group the Strokes incorporated fuzzy and static ambiance as a way of enhancing their music, placing them at the forefront of a wave of garage rock bands.

Throughout the 2000s the aesthetics of lo-fi music were increasingly apparent in hip-hop music. Japanese music producer Nujabes created a lo-fi style of hip-hop with characteristics of slow jazz played over hip-hop drum loops. The music featured prominently in the score of the popular 2004 anime series Samurai Champloo. Hip-hop producer and artist J Dilla used a fine touch of low fidelity production to capture a nostalgic retro vibe. Selections of his music were featured in 2006 on several segments of Adult Swim, a late-night television block for teens and young adult viewers on Cartoon Network. By the 2010s the low-fidelity aspect of lo-fi music had attracted a new generation of do-it-yourself artists, who increasingly used computer software to create music. Many artists took the stripped-down production approaches of lo-fi pioneers and blended elements of jazz, easy listening, pop, and electronic music. Frequently, melodies were set to down-tempo hip-hop beats, resulting in a musical cocktail with a chill, cozy ambiance and an overall dreamy quality that rendered it useful as background music. Lo-fi music increased in popularity in the 2020s, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, when large numbers of people were working and attending school from home and sought out background music conducive to work and study. Between January and September 2020, searches for the term lo-fi on Google increased by some 85 percent.

Lo-fi music was popular in the digital domain, particularly on streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music. A Spotify playlist known as Lofi Beats had more than 51,000 monthly listeners in early 2024. On YouTube the channel Lofi Girl, started in 2017 as ChilledCow, features a continuous live stream of lo-fi music. The video on-screen plays a repeating animation loop of a young woman, drawn in the style of anime, studying in her bedroom while her cat naps peacefully on her windowsill. By early 2024 the channel had nearly 14 million subscribers and more than 1.8 billion views in its lifetime.