pitchfork-com-30jzgl.txt (18645B)
1 [1]Skip to main content 2 Open Navigation Menu 3 [3]Pitchfork 4 5 • [4]Newsletter 6 7 Search 8 9 • [6]News 10 • [7]Reviews 11 • [8]Best New Music 12 • [9]Features 13 • [10]Lists 14 • [11]Columns 15 • [12]Video 16 17 Open Navigation Menu 18 [14]Pitchfork 19 Search 20 [16]Columns 21 22 How AI Wreaked Havoc on the Lo-Fi Beat Scene 23 24 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 25 [17]Rabbit Holed is Kieran Press-Reynolds’ weekly column exploring songs and 26 scenes at the intersection of music and digital culture, separating shitpost 27 genius from shitpassé lameness. This week, he explores how artificial 28 intelligence has laid waste to the once-burgeoning world of lo-fi beats. 29 By [18]Kieran Press-Reynolds 30 July 2, 2025 31 Play/Pause Button 32 Graphic by [20]Chris Panicker 33 Save this story 34 Save this story 35 36 In the mid-2010s, when I was in high school, the genre known as lo-fi beats was 37 like a brain cleanse for all my time spent mainlining Minecraft and YouTube. 38 The music was tender, with drums sizzling like kitchen pans and trumpet that 39 zigzagged over the soundscape’s [23]open pasture. Perfectly timed samples leapt 40 out like [24]flickers of a memory. Only a few channels soared back then; the 41 mixes all had whimsical titles and background visuals that simulated the 42 feeling of sitting indoors, cocooned in a duvet, while rain lightly falls 43 outside. 44 45 Fast-forward to now, and the scene has putrefied into a wasteland of the 46 percussive undead. The YouTube search results have warped into an apparent AI 47 breeding ground, [25]crammed with [26]hourlong mixes [27]full of [28]soporific 48 dreck. The channels have similar names and cartoonish Kawaii imagery. Even the 49 comments of the videos, which have millions of plays, brim with what look like 50 fake conversations—pseudoymous accounts prattling on about how the music helped 51 them unlock their true potential in life. Multiple channels repeat the same 52 sentence structure like, “I don’t want much! I just want the person reading 53 this to be healthy, happy, and loved!,” suggesting they’re AI-generated. “To 54 whoever reads this comment: you are a wonderful person and I love you,” [29] 55 writes one channel called Coffee Time, which specializes in [30]videos with 56 titles that read more like Airbnb listings than music: “Happy Morning Jazz | 57 Elegant Bossa Nova In Luxury Cliffside Cabin Overlooking the Sea for 58 Relaxation.” It’s the theme song for the [31]dead internet theory, a rave-yard 59 of zombified AI agents chilling out to death. 60 61 Longtime heads who fell in love with lo-fi beats and delicately craft it 62 themselves are starting to panic. Obsessives on the Reddit forum for lo-fi 63 beats, which banned AI submissions late last year, recently despaired about how 64 the scene has been “overtaken” and “[32]lost its soul.” Some artists report 65 losing significant opportunities and having to switch careers because of the 66 genre’s downturn; others are paranoid, unable to discern the real from the 67 hoax. 68 69 Mia Eden, a 23-year-old from Manchester, England, is one of a slew of lo-fi 70 beatmakers who explicitly state that their videos are “made by real people” and 71 free of AI. She runs a channel called [33]Lofi Louis, inspired by the name of 72 her friend’s pet rabbit, and records under the alias Rosia! She started making 73 the music in 2021 after stumbling on channels like the infamous, perpetually 74 studying [34]Lofi Girl. Eden dug deeper and found the underground lo-fi scene, 75 a community of artists who happily shared advice, made lo-fi beat-themed 76 podcasts, and collaborated on compilations. Years ago, Eden earned anywhere 77 from $500 to $1,500 a month from her songs getting slots on DSP editorial 78 playlists; now, after the AI boom, that’s mostly dried up—Spotify’s lo-fi 79 playlists spill with viral songs from suspicious profiles with no descriptions. 80 Eden first noticed a dumpster’s worth of AI cover art, and then people 81 full-sending the grift with AI music. She says she’s been tricked by some of 82 her favorite channels starting to sneakily integrate AI. 83 84 “Previously, you could stream a track on Spotify or Apple and almost be certain 85 you followed them on Instagram or spoke to them on Discord because the 86 community was so tight-knit,” she says. “Now, it feels so nameless—where this 87 could be an artist that maybe doesn’t like to show face, or it’s a computer. 88 You can’t always distinguish now, and I’d say it’s over half [AI].” 89 90 Alex Reade, a 32-year-old from the United Kingdom, thinks the genre is “the 91 most uninviting it’s ever been,” choked in a swamp of shit: listless, 92 derivative beats and pure AI slop. He came to the genre around the turn of the 93 decade, and was intrigued by the idea of trying to infuse things like post-rock 94 into lo-fi. While working overnight shifts at a tech company’s store in an 95 emptied-out mall, he’d balance out the spectral creepiness of the space with 96 chill lo-fi beats. Like Eden, he’s seen a sharp dropoff in streams under his 97 alias [35]Project AER; a skyrocketing count of two million listeners per month 98 a few years ago has sunk to 420,000 today. Spotify’s fickle playlist placements 99 and lo-fi’s enshittification has freaked him out. “There’s so much anxiety 100 around what to do as artists,” he told me. “I’m trying to find any other means 101 so I can take that reliance that I have on lo-fi out of my life because it 102 causes me a lot of stress.” 103 104 Many people credit lo-fi beats to the [36]mothbitten jazz-hop of J Dilla and 105 [37]Nujabes. It’s a slightly misleading term, since the sound isn’t always 106 low-fidelity, and the phrase “lo-fi” already has many other meanings in music. 107 It goes back to indie rock in the ’90s with one-man noise-makers and fuzzy 108 bands like Guided by Voices, who made a deliberately imperfect, clangorous 109 sound—partly as a reaction to the pristine quality of the CD era. “Lo-fi beats” 110 coasts on the vaguest of associations, and there was never an ideological 111 motive behind it. But its success online might partly come from it being the 112 antithesis of so much ultraglossy, hi-fi music in the 2010s, from hyperpop to 113 mainstream trap and pop. Lo-fi beats are [38]frayed and slipshod, with a [39] 114 dustiness that carries the hallucination of lowkey intimacy, like you’re [40] 115 overhearing someone practicing their drumming. 116 117 The scene proper didn’t really crystallize until the mid-2010s, when Lofi Girl 118 and other online hotspots cropped up. The music was unofficially christened as 119 “lo-fi beats to study to,” taken from the clickbait title of so many [41] 120 YouTube mixes that curated soothing yet stimulating instrumental music. It 121 became a macro-genre catchall term for anything vaguely chill, jazzy, wistful, 122 playlistable: capacious enough to cover both J Dilla and cosmic IDM. The scene 123 had a slew of [42]mini-stars—producers like [43]eevee and [44]potsu, who’s 124 maybe most known for making the [45]petal-soft beat that XXXTentacion later 125 hijacked for his massively popular “[46]Jocelyn Flores.” 126 127 The dreamiest beats offered a kind of divine comfort, from sublime bossa nova 128 soundtracks for Pokémon games that don’t exist to the [47]bittersweet beats 129 sampling Shiloh Dynasty, the enigmatic vocalist who is basically the scene’s 130 Imogen Heap. Listening to the Flume-ified tripstream of eery’s “[48]hardly” 131 instantly takes me back to the days when I first heard it as a teen—it inspired 132 me to crack FL Studio and try to create my own instrumental mischief. 133 (Thankfully, I pivoted to writing.) 134 135 AI has annexed the lo-fi scene for a hodgepodge of reasons: The lack of vocals, 136 which typically gives away robo fraudulence, make it easier to infiltrate; the 137 music’s association with aimless, unfocused listening—vibe music before vibe 138 became a buzzword—means people aren’t paying as much attention to what’s real 139 and what’s not; the fixation on fantastical, Studio Ghibli–core visuals, which 140 image generators can vomit up with ease. Take Mewy Cat Lofi’s “Relaxing Lofi 141 for Study Time,” which lures passersby with [49]adorable animations of Pusheen 142 before, five hours into the 12-hour mix, they realize the same chord 143 progression has seemingly repeated 100 times. YouTube offers [50]creators the 144 option to disclose if their videos use AI, but they only require disclosure for 145 some things, such as “altering a famous car chase scene to include a celebrity 146 who wasn’t in the original movie.” A few [51]viral mixes have “Altered or 147 synthetic content” warnings in the description, but many don’t. 148 149 “It’s a travesty, truly,” groans Dreamwave, a 26-year-old from Washington whose 150 channel was one of the [52]earliest and biggest lo-fi archives, and who has 151 never used AI for his carefully curated videos. He describes the arc of his 152 channel as a slow, soul-crushing descent, from a thriving community of lo-fi 153 lovers to minimal views on his uploads. He says it’d take him a month to sculpt 154 a three-hour mix of lo-fi music—discovering and blending the sweetest tunes, 155 asking for permission—while autobot channels can do it with a few clicks. “With 156 AI, you can just come up with some ridiculous chord progression and then turn 157 it into an ambient track where there’s just not a lot going on,” he explains. 158 “You can almost loop it over and over and then upload that. You can upload 159 three hour compilations every day.” He believes he’s lost millions of views 160 because his sparse uploads have been deprioritized in the search results. “It 161 really pisses me off to see anything AI-generated getting so many views. It 162 enrages me.” 163 164 “The oversaturation caused by AI-generated music is very real,” adds Berkkan 165 B., the manager of Lofi Records, the label spearheaded by Lofi Girl. “It’s 166 flooding the platforms, and unless streaming services implement some kind of 167 regulation, which we hope they will, this will inevitably dilute the presence 168 and visibility of real artists.” While Berkkan believes AI “can be a powerful 169 tool” to do things like “enhance workflows” and “refine ideas,” they say that 170 everything on the Lofi Girl channel comes from human composers and designers. 171 172 I spoke with a pseudonymous creator who uses AI to power four separate 173 channels: jazz music, meditation, rain sounds, and [53]Lofi Tone Art, the 174 latter of which has amassed over 10 million cumulative views. The clips often 175 show looping gifs of murky cityspaces and rain-soaked cabins that offer a “[54] 176 quiet sanctuary in the storm.” They told me they use AI to create everything: 177 ChatGPT for descriptions; other unspecified software (likely Udio or Suno, the 178 most popular programs that generate music from text prompts) for the audio. “To 179 be honest, I think at this stage, AI still struggles to outperform real music 180 due to its high error rate,” they told me in an email. “However, when used as a 181 supportive tool, it can be incredibly helpful. When selecting songs, I usually 182 listen to them repeatedly to ensure they sound smooth and don’t overpower the 183 mood.” 184 185 Detractors might argue that lo-fi beats was always mercenary music engineered 186 and optimized to hook sad bois with no taste, and good riddance. But to the 187 aficionados, it’s sacred music—the musical madeleine for a generation that 188 listened to it through the highs and lows of their adolescence. Dreamwave says 189 every upload to his channel represents a memory in his life. Reade sounds 190 jubilant as he expounds upon his love for the somnambulant churn of 191 Philanthrope and Sleepy Fish’s “[55]Space Cadet,” a track he claims he “could 192 literally put on repeat and just listen to forever.” 193 194 For these lo-fi fanatics, the music came with the bonus of a lovely community. 195 Eden described the scene as something like a virtual neighborhood, with 196 specific comps supporting women beatmakers and online friends she’s since met 197 in real-life, like the founders of the Portuguese label Salad Day Records. 198 Reade recalls being in a cluster of Twitter chats, along with a Discord channel 199 called “Lofi Backstage” that’s a who’s-who of “peak era” lo-fi GOATs. Dreamwave 200 used to play Rocket League with other YouTuber-archivists, and relished the raw 201 thoughts people left on his videos. “A lot of the comments on my channel are 202 usually people going like, ‘Hey, I remember when I was listening to this song 203 with my ex-girlfriend seven years ago, and I just wanted to comment and say 204 that we broke up.’ You can’t find that in an AI-generated video.” 205 206 Many of these artists are fighting back, writing screeds against AI and 207 commissioning art from illustrators whose livelihoods are being threatened. 208 There’s a hint of futility in their voices as they wonder about what lo-fi will 209 look like in a few years, but also a plucky determination, like they’re 210 bedroom-producer Davids battling big bad Gol-AI-ith. It’s likely that as AI 211 advances and makes reasonable facsimiles of even more genres, there’ll be a 212 reverse push for realness—akin to listeners obsessing over vinyl or obscure 213 formats, the human touch could become a boutique feature, like raw milk at the 214 farmer’s market. Lo-AI hasn’t won the battle yet; it means too much to these 215 people. “When things get so bleak with lo-fi or just the world, right, it’s 216 very easy to enter a state of nihilism. Like, why should I do any of it, when 217 it’s all so fruitless?” Reade said. “You do it for yourself. That’s the core 218 thing with art and music for me.” 219 220 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 221 What I’m listening to: 222 Tags[56]Rabbit Holed 223 [57]Pitchfork 224 The most trusted voice in music 225 226 • [58] 227 • [59] 228 • [60] 229 • [61] 230 • [62] 231 232 • [63]Video 233 • [64]Lists & Guides 234 • [65]Podcast 235 • [66]Masthead 236 • [67]RSS 237 • [68]Site Map 238 • [69]FAQ 239 • [70]Subscribe 240 241 • [71]Pitchfork Music Festival Chicago 242 • [72]Pitchfork Music Festival London 243 • [73]Pitchfork Music Festival Paris 244 • [74]Pitchfork Music Festival CDMX 245 • [75]All Events 246 247 • [76]User Agreement 248 • [77]Privacy Policy 249 • [78]Your California Privacy Rights 250 • [79]Newsletter 251 • [80]RSS Feeds 252 • [81]Contact 253 • [82]Accessibility Help 254 • [83]Advertising 255 • 256 257 © 2026 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. 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