YouTube & Chill: A Glimpse Into The World Of Lo-fi Hip-Hop

In the corners of YouTube, thousands of viewers are tuned into a radio station featuring an endless loop of a .gif of an anime girl writing in her journal. She’s soundtracked by hazy beats smothered in tape hiss, next to her is a chatroom with people from all over the world writing in multiple languages. Thousands of people have come to this stream for microgenre of music: lo-fi hip-hop.

“Lo-fi is short for low fidelity, and essentially means bad quality, but purposefully,” said Vague003, a lo-fi hip-hop artist who has been in the scene for two years and is best known for his beat tape Anime and Heartbreak. “This bad quality makes it stand out, just like overblown bass and distorted vocals make ‘SoundCloud rap’ stand out.”

Lo-fi may be a niche genre, but it’s become a notable trend on YouTube, the world’s biggest platform for music streaming. According to a 2017 Music Consumer Insight Report, 85% of YouTube users—1.3 billion people—visited the website to listen to music in August 2017 alone. Apple Music and Spotify may have ignited the streaming wars, but YouTube’s traffic dwarfs their userbases. At the same time, YouTube’s Live feature and related video algorithms have helped foster niche genres like lo-fi hip-hop in the last few years.

Searching “lo-fi” or simply “hip-hop” on YouTube shows a handful of live channels the platform hosts. Channels who use their “live” feature rank higher on YouTube’s search results. It’s a safe bet if you see a 30+ minute video with a thumbnail image of Yu Yu Hakusho, or a title t y p e d l i k e t h i s, it’s most likely a user-created lo-fi hip-hop mix. Meanwhile, lo-fi hip-hop has become its own meme thanks to being synonymous with digital streaming fatigue and anime culture.

Most of these channels are run by reserved anime fans—few lo-fi hip-hop channels returned any query for an interview with Genius. Some channels are 24/7 streams, some operate as sporadic pop-ups who stream for a few hours. But all stations find ways to cater to the lean-back listener, someone looking for endless hours of background music as they clean their house, study for an exam, or just want to chill.

“The whole idea [of lo-fi hip-hop] is sonic nostalgia, but not in an overly aggressive or ironic way like vaporwave or retrowave,” said YouTuber Ryan Celsius, whose lo-fi channel boasts 250,000 subscribers. “It’s usually beat production that can sound undermixed, containing intended or unintended imperfections with a heavy focus on creative sample use and authentic sounding drums kits. It’s usually a tape hiss or some analog distortion set against a simple set of drum loops and an incredible sample selection.”

Although YouTube first introduced its “live” feature back in 2011, lo-fi hip-hop radio station didn’t really take off until 2017. Chilled Cow’s channel was one of the the first 24/7 lo-fi hip-hop stations on YouTube. Today, Chilled Cow remains the biggest lo-fi hip-hop live station with over a million subscribers and thousands of live radio listeners. Their station sports a playlist of over 300+ songs from over 100 different artists, including Soho, mt. fujitive, leavv, jinsang. But hip-hop fans who listen to the channel are likely to hear songs and recognize vocal samples of classic ‘90s rappers like Mobb Deep or The Notorious B.I.G..

Chillhop music is another popular lo-fi destination on YouTube, it has 1.4 millions subscribers but no longer runs a live stream. Operating at a smaller scale than Chilled Cow or Chillhop music are the bootleg boy (640K subscribers), NEOTIC (559k subscribers), nourish (290k subscribers), Ryan Celsius (260k subscribers) and Mellowbeat Seeker (267k subscribers). All of these channels feature unique still frames, rotating playlists, and unique uploads.

Ryan Celsius, a self-proclaimed “𝙰𝙴𝚂𝚃𝙷𝙴𝚃𝙸𝙲 𝙳𝙸𝙴𝚃𝚈,” was the only YouTube streamer willing to comment for this piece—the rest preferred to be cloaked in secrecy. “I started my original channel in 2012 after spending a long time creating music playlists and digging around to find new music on YouTube,” Ryan explained through email. Between 2012 and 2017, RyanCelsiusSounds gained around 10,000 subscribers, but his channel didn’t take off until 4/20 2017, after he uploaded a trap/lofi mix titled HIGH AT WORK. “I was experimenting with creating a music live stream. I started the stream on 4/20 last year and it maintained about 20 viewers for a few weeks, but then grew quickly when other channels began also attempting to create 24/7 music streams."

Prior to acting as YouTube-operated radio stations, Ambition, Chillhop Music, and other lo-fi hip-hop channels existed as an avenue for SoundCloud reuploads. While SoundCloud rap’s aggressive origins blossomed in 2016, lo-fi hip-hop existed on the opposite end of the spectrum that same year. YouTube stations will often source their songs from Soundcloud and then create mixes that can be looped for hours without end. Eventually, rather than upload new hour-long mixes, channels began hosting 24/7 live stations.

A few glances at threads featured in LofiHipHop Reddit show constant arguments about when the genre first took off and who pioneered the sound. While many point to the late Nujabes and J DIlla as the godfathers of lo-fi, BSD.U is widely considered to be the leader of the new wave. As for the genre’s major artists, the most influential names that pop up the most in radio and playlist rotation are Nohidea, Eevee, BSD.U, Jinsang, and TomppaBeats.

[Ambition] is arguably the most unique channel of its kind. It’s run by a single elusive man (or boy?) under the channel’s alias. The channel description reads “sad boy who posts music,” has managed to garner 16,000 registered users onto a Discord server—a sort of Slack workplace for gamers. Discord offers a more sophisticated chatroom experience than Youtube provides. On it, users will discuss their favorite lo-fi artists, anime shows, weed, and promote their own art. The person behind the channel lurks on the Discord server, occasionally interacting with his community members and announcing new “sad mixes” for “sad boys.” (He declined requests to comment on this story, as did nearly every other lo-fi streamer.)

Even if all the makers of the genre remain press averse, there doesn’t appear to be any end in sight for lo-fi hip-hop’s growth. Hour-long mixes on the platform have racked up millions of plays within a year, while 24/7 live streams continue to attract thousands of listeners who simply need some type of noise behind their homework or household chores. Lo-fi hip-hop can keep trending upward, so long as the genre works hand-in-hand with YouTube’s technology to deliver laid-back vibes to the modern masses.

[Editor’s Note—After this piece published, Chillhop Music reached out to Genius to claim they were streaming a year before Chilled Cow and that they previously had a live stream. The article has been updated to reflect that. Genius had not previously reached out to Chillhop Music for comment.]