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[1]Skip to main content
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[16]Columns
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How AI Wreaked Havoc on the Lo-Fi Beat Scene
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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[17]Rabbit Holed is Kieran Press-Reynolds’ weekly column exploring songs and
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scenes at the intersection of music and digital culture, separating shitpost
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genius from shitpassé lameness. This week, he explores how artificial
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intelligence has laid waste to the once-burgeoning world of lo-fi beats.
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By [18]Kieran Press-Reynolds
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July 2, 2025
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Play/Pause Button
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Graphic by [20]Chris Panicker
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Save this story
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Save this story
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In the mid-2010s, when I was in high school, the genre known as lo-fi beats was
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like a brain cleanse for all my time spent mainlining Minecraft and YouTube.
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The music was tender, with drums sizzling like kitchen pans and trumpet that
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zigzagged over the soundscape’s [23]open pasture. Perfectly timed samples leapt
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out like [24]flickers of a memory. Only a few channels soared back then; the
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mixes all had whimsical titles and background visuals that simulated the
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feeling of sitting indoors, cocooned in a duvet, while rain lightly falls
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outside.
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Fast-forward to now, and the scene has putrefied into a wasteland of the
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percussive undead. The YouTube search results have warped into an apparent AI
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breeding ground, [25]crammed with [26]hourlong mixes [27]full of [28]soporific
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dreck. The channels have similar names and cartoonish Kawaii imagery. Even the
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comments of the videos, which have millions of plays, brim with what look like
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fake conversations—pseudoymous accounts prattling on about how the music helped
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them unlock their true potential in life. Multiple channels repeat the same
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sentence structure like, “I don’t want much! I just want the person reading
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this to be healthy, happy, and loved!,” suggesting they’re AI-generated. “To
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whoever reads this comment: you are a wonderful person and I love you,” [29]
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writes one channel called Coffee Time, which specializes in [30]videos with
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titles that read more like Airbnb listings than music: “Happy Morning Jazz |
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Elegant Bossa Nova In Luxury Cliffside Cabin Overlooking the Sea for
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Relaxation.” It’s the theme song for the [31]dead internet theory, a rave-yard
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of zombified AI agents chilling out to death.
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Longtime heads who fell in love with lo-fi beats and delicately craft it
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themselves are starting to panic. Obsessives on the Reddit forum for lo-fi
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beats, which banned AI submissions late last year, recently despaired about how
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the scene has been “overtaken” and “[32]lost its soul.” Some artists report
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losing significant opportunities and having to switch careers because of the
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genre’s downturn; others are paranoid, unable to discern the real from the
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hoax.
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Mia Eden, a 23-year-old from Manchester, England, is one of a slew of lo-fi
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beatmakers who explicitly state that their videos are “made by real people” and
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free of AI. She runs a channel called [33]Lofi Louis, inspired by the name of
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her friend’s pet rabbit, and records under the alias Rosia! She started making
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the music in 2021 after stumbling on channels like the infamous, perpetually
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studying [34]Lofi Girl. Eden dug deeper and found the underground lo-fi scene,
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a community of artists who happily shared advice, made lo-fi beat-themed
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podcasts, and collaborated on compilations. Years ago, Eden earned anywhere
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from $500 to $1,500 a month from her songs getting slots on DSP editorial
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playlists; now, after the AI boom, that’s mostly dried up—Spotify’s lo-fi
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playlists spill with viral songs from suspicious profiles with no descriptions.
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Eden first noticed a dumpster’s worth of AI cover art, and then people
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full-sending the grift with AI music. She says she’s been tricked by some of
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her favorite channels starting to sneakily integrate AI.
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“Previously, you could stream a track on Spotify or Apple and almost be certain
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you followed them on Instagram or spoke to them on Discord because the
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community was so tight-knit,” she says. “Now, it feels so nameless—where this
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could be an artist that maybe doesn’t like to show face, or it’s a computer.
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You can’t always distinguish now, and I’d say it’s over half [AI].”
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Alex Reade, a 32-year-old from the United Kingdom, thinks the genre is “the
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most uninviting it’s ever been,” choked in a swamp of shit: listless,
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derivative beats and pure AI slop. He came to the genre around the turn of the
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decade, and was intrigued by the idea of trying to infuse things like post-rock
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into lo-fi. While working overnight shifts at a tech company’s store in an
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emptied-out mall, he’d balance out the spectral creepiness of the space with
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chill lo-fi beats. Like Eden, he’s seen a sharp dropoff in streams under his
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alias [35]Project AER; a skyrocketing count of two million listeners per month
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a few years ago has sunk to 420,000 today. Spotify’s fickle playlist placements
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and lo-fi’s enshittification has freaked him out. “There’s so much anxiety
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around what to do as artists,” he told me. “I’m trying to find any other means
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so I can take that reliance that I have on lo-fi out of my life because it
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causes me a lot of stress.”
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Many people credit lo-fi beats to the [36]mothbitten jazz-hop of J Dilla and
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[37]Nujabes. It’s a slightly misleading term, since the sound isn’t always
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low-fidelity, and the phrase “lo-fi” already has many other meanings in music.
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It goes back to indie rock in the ’90s with one-man noise-makers and fuzzy
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bands like Guided by Voices, who made a deliberately imperfect, clangorous
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sound—partly as a reaction to the pristine quality of the CD era. “Lo-fi beats”
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coasts on the vaguest of associations, and there was never an ideological
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motive behind it. But its success online might partly come from it being the
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antithesis of so much ultraglossy, hi-fi music in the 2010s, from hyperpop to
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mainstream trap and pop. Lo-fi beats are [38]frayed and slipshod, with a [39]
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dustiness that carries the hallucination of lowkey intimacy, like you’re [40]
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overhearing someone practicing their drumming.
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The scene proper didn’t really crystallize until the mid-2010s, when Lofi Girl
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and other online hotspots cropped up. The music was unofficially christened as
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“lo-fi beats to study to,” taken from the clickbait title of so many [41]
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YouTube mixes that curated soothing yet stimulating instrumental music. It
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became a macro-genre catchall term for anything vaguely chill, jazzy, wistful,
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playlistable: capacious enough to cover both J Dilla and cosmic IDM. The scene
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had a slew of [42]mini-stars—producers like [43]eevee and [44]potsu, who’s
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maybe most known for making the [45]petal-soft beat that XXXTentacion later
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hijacked for his massively popular “[46]Jocelyn Flores.”
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The dreamiest beats offered a kind of divine comfort, from sublime bossa nova
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soundtracks for Pokémon games that don’t exist to the [47]bittersweet beats
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sampling Shiloh Dynasty, the enigmatic vocalist who is basically the scene’s
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Imogen Heap. Listening to the Flume-ified tripstream of eery’s “[48]hardly”
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instantly takes me back to the days when I first heard it as a teen—it inspired
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me to crack FL Studio and try to create my own instrumental mischief.
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(Thankfully, I pivoted to writing.)
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AI has annexed the lo-fi scene for a hodgepodge of reasons: The lack of vocals,
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which typically gives away robo fraudulence, make it easier to infiltrate; the
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music’s association with aimless, unfocused listening—vibe music before vibe
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became a buzzword—means people aren’t paying as much attention to what’s real
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and what’s not; the fixation on fantastical, Studio Ghibli–core visuals, which
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image generators can vomit up with ease. Take Mewy Cat Lofi’s “Relaxing Lofi
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for Study Time,” which lures passersby with [49]adorable animations of Pusheen
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before, five hours into the 12-hour mix, they realize the same chord
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progression has seemingly repeated 100 times. YouTube offers [50]creators the
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option to disclose if their videos use AI, but they only require disclosure for
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some things, such as “altering a famous car chase scene to include a celebrity
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who wasn’t in the original movie.” A few [51]viral mixes have “Altered or
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synthetic content” warnings in the description, but many don’t.
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“It’s a travesty, truly,” groans Dreamwave, a 26-year-old from Washington whose
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channel was one of the [52]earliest and biggest lo-fi archives, and who has
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never used AI for his carefully curated videos. He describes the arc of his
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channel as a slow, soul-crushing descent, from a thriving community of lo-fi
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lovers to minimal views on his uploads. He says it’d take him a month to sculpt
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a three-hour mix of lo-fi music—discovering and blending the sweetest tunes,
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asking for permission—while autobot channels can do it with a few clicks. “With
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AI, you can just come up with some ridiculous chord progression and then turn
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it into an ambient track where there’s just not a lot going on,” he explains.
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“You can almost loop it over and over and then upload that. You can upload
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three hour compilations every day.” He believes he’s lost millions of views
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because his sparse uploads have been deprioritized in the search results. “It
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really pisses me off to see anything AI-generated getting so many views. It
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enrages me.”
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“The oversaturation caused by AI-generated music is very real,” adds Berkkan
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B., the manager of Lofi Records, the label spearheaded by Lofi Girl. “It’s
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flooding the platforms, and unless streaming services implement some kind of
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regulation, which we hope they will, this will inevitably dilute the presence
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and visibility of real artists.” While Berkkan believes AI “can be a powerful
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tool” to do things like “enhance workflows” and “refine ideas,” they say that
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everything on the Lofi Girl channel comes from human composers and designers.
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I spoke with a pseudonymous creator who uses AI to power four separate
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channels: jazz music, meditation, rain sounds, and [53]Lofi Tone Art, the
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latter of which has amassed over 10 million cumulative views. The clips often
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show looping gifs of murky cityspaces and rain-soaked cabins that offer a “[54]
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quiet sanctuary in the storm.” They told me they use AI to create everything:
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ChatGPT for descriptions; other unspecified software (likely Udio or Suno, the
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most popular programs that generate music from text prompts) for the audio. “To
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be honest, I think at this stage, AI still struggles to outperform real music
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due to its high error rate,” they told me in an email. “However, when used as a
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supportive tool, it can be incredibly helpful. When selecting songs, I usually
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listen to them repeatedly to ensure they sound smooth and don’t overpower the
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mood.”
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Detractors might argue that lo-fi beats was always mercenary music engineered
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and optimized to hook sad bois with no taste, and good riddance. But to the
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aficionados, it’s sacred music—the musical madeleine for a generation that
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listened to it through the highs and lows of their adolescence. Dreamwave says
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every upload to his channel represents a memory in his life. Reade sounds
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jubilant as he expounds upon his love for the somnambulant churn of
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Philanthrope and Sleepy Fish’s “[55]Space Cadet,” a track he claims he “could
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literally put on repeat and just listen to forever.”
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For these lo-fi fanatics, the music came with the bonus of a lovely community.
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Eden described the scene as something like a virtual neighborhood, with
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specific comps supporting women beatmakers and online friends she’s since met
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in real-life, like the founders of the Portuguese label Salad Day Records.
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Reade recalls being in a cluster of Twitter chats, along with a Discord channel
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called “Lofi Backstage” that’s a who’s-who of “peak era” lo-fi GOATs. Dreamwave
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used to play Rocket League with other YouTuber-archivists, and relished the raw
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thoughts people left on his videos. “A lot of the comments on my channel are
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usually people going like, ‘Hey, I remember when I was listening to this song
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with my ex-girlfriend seven years ago, and I just wanted to comment and say
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that we broke up.’ You can’t find that in an AI-generated video.”
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Many of these artists are fighting back, writing screeds against AI and
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commissioning art from illustrators whose livelihoods are being threatened.
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There’s a hint of futility in their voices as they wonder about what lo-fi will
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look like in a few years, but also a plucky determination, like they’re
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bedroom-producer Davids battling big bad Gol-AI-ith. It’s likely that as AI
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advances and makes reasonable facsimiles of even more genres, there’ll be a
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reverse push for realness—akin to listeners obsessing over vinyl or obscure
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formats, the human touch could become a boutique feature, like raw milk at the
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farmer’s market. Lo-AI hasn’t won the battle yet; it means too much to these
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people. “When things get so bleak with lo-fi or just the world, right, it’s
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very easy to enter a state of nihilism. Like, why should I do any of it, when
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it’s all so fruitless?” Reade said. “You do it for yourself. That’s the core
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thing with art and music for me.”
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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What I’m listening to:
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Tags[56]Rabbit Holed
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References:
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[1] https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-ai-wreaked-havoc-on-the-lo-fi-beat-scene/#main-content
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[3] https://pitchfork.com/
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[4] https://pitchfork.com/newsletter
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[16] https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/
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[17] https://pitchfork.com/tags/rabbit-holed/
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[18] https://pitchfork.com/staff/kieran-press-reynolds/
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[20] https://www.panicker.design/
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[23] https://youtu.be/MmPemW9ZJtE?si=SpJ7p_QB0g9ENnZW
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[24] https://youtu.be/HC6xx-GxlUY?si=XNosGThH-JVKNXMD
|
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[25] https://youtu.be/t2WD-eEPXFE?si=nztdyZVbJW_-gPti
|
||
[26] https://youtu.be/Bh_QhurLUwU?si=Tdigb5Hj2w3BaVoW
|
||
[27] https://youtu.be/9GaBMZRHM3U?si=4p2PReY8V3Q0HRES
|
||
[28] https://youtu.be/BCxTQq0UiFs?si=CqBf7ljlGOgqB74S
|
||
[29] https://youtu.be/BCxTQq0UiFs?si=Ph1E7NYqWmQSg7nS
|
||
[30] https://youtu.be/OZ3yirnnQQE?si=g37Je8NWQVob0Zcq
|
||
[31] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
|
||
[32] https://www.reddit.com/r/LofiHipHop/comments/1kxslzd/lofi_has_lost_its_soul/
|
||
[33] https://www.youtube.com/@lofilouismusic
|
||
[34] https://www.youtube.com/@LofiGirl
|
||
[35] https://youtu.be/iwrjRC2qcXU?si=JW33JsBgcQdwY6Cn
|
||
[36] https://youtu.be/nrOW7U0pnB4?si=bKlSdzLsawRDpup9
|
||
[37] https://youtu.be/8iP3J8jFYdM?si=ce-0yin-4njpes2C
|
||
[38] https://youtu.be/naV2N1K0A3g?si=ixxSL99wID4C4HAX
|
||
[39] https://youtu.be/9nvytHNsz5M?si=63lPvGYPX_nNdXRy
|
||
[40] https://youtu.be/lZq4UDKja24?si=p-11ablZiDFxHioh
|
||
[41] https://youtu.be/s49CT4DTAkw?si=MfEeXKa6OYrpDGGW
|
||
[42] https://youtu.be/2a-kz_4Yfuw?si=kjPFB3QVy-CiX_sP
|
||
[43] https://youtu.be/1_Q3b0NS_Ek?si=J-XUnpamtn2M6aEP
|
||
[44] https://youtu.be/WqCpWu8tgRw?si=U9J2afkx96ORrqdw
|
||
[45] https://youtu.be/xSB8trUFX1A?si=yR-Eg_uRj8aojeRh
|
||
[46] https://youtu.be/FAucVNRx_mU?si=bUOJOAZtvrJJIJSH
|
||
[47] https://youtu.be/7ly7Mhle-4M?si=f6fiSvwd0UAZBcL9
|
||
[48] https://youtu.be/Vyj0kLPi2IA?si=PQceppX890RRtuMK
|
||
[49] https://www.youtube.com/live/LUgjx7_84_Y?si=vGJozd88mdXqDZja
|
||
[50] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14328491?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid
|
||
[51] https://youtu.be/Bh_QhurLUwU?si=xX0urBi0IClyNSqZ
|
||
[52] https://www.youtube.com/@Dreamwave
|
||
[53] https://www.youtube.com/@Lo-fi_chill_mix/videos
|
||
[54] https://youtu.be/fWtFZE_du0Y?si=T2Pwu-YNJo6WSMRq
|
||
[55] https://youtu.be/aLTo-gmdClw?si=m7Uw6uhnxi_s5lLI
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[56] https://pitchfork.com/tags/rabbit-holed/
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[57] https://pitchfork.com/
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[58] https://www.instagram.com/pitchfork/
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[63] https://pitchfork.com/tv/
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[64] https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/
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[79] https://pitchfork.com/newsletter
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[80] https://pitchfork.com/info/rss
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[81] https://pitchfork.com/info/contact
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[82] https://pitchfork.com/info/accessibility-help
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[83] https://pitchfork.com/info/ad
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[84] http://www.aboutads.info/
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