🦝 Seven Years as an Avid Listener of Chillhop Music
Lofi music is popular among students, office workers, remote workers, coders, basically anyone having to work or study at a computer. But anyone can access a vast library of music using the YouTube app on their phone, tablet, and smart TV. Go to YouTube, search "lofi + [keyword]" and there are endless offerings of playlists to listen to. Here's just a few, I've looked up:
Back to the BlueSky convo - so, they were looking to try something different, more upbeat tunes to help with their workflow. Of course, I recommend my favorite Lofi channel on YouTube: Chillhop. Founded in 2013 and based in the Netherlands, it's become one of the largest channels with 3.29 million subscribers at the time of this writing.
My response
Lofi Girl is great, my heart is with Chillhop, helped me thru the pandemic. Good luck on finding those playlists!
It was simple response, but I realized that I've never said this part out loud before. How a YouTube channel got me (and my family) through a global pandemic that affected billions of people.
How I Found Chillhop Music
Shortly before the pandemic, I went looking on YouTube for some holiday music to listen to in my office. I wanted to find tracks that were upbeat, a bit nostalgic and festive. I found some great Lofi Christmas playlists (anyone remember the Christmas + Charlie Brown lofi tracks??). I eventually wanted to find other music within the genre and some of the first artists I came across were SteezyAsFuck, the bootleg boy, Dreamy, City Girl, Ambition, Dreamy Radio, Homework Radio, The Jazz Hop Café, and of course, the famous ChilledCow/Lofi Girl. I enjoyed listening to all of their tracks, but then I came across a channel that had this mesmerizing mix of loop animations that felt like "storybook meets lofi music". It was Chillhop Music.
Seeing their videos took me back some years, back when Gmail first started offering dynamic backgrounds. My favorite one was the Tea House and the Fox. The animations would cycle through day and night and you could periodically see the fox quietly tending to each section of their garden. It created a story that I enjoyed watching as I tried my best to keep in my inbox(es) to manageable levels of spam and clutter.
Chillhop reminded me of those short storytelling vignettes and being able to listen and live vicariously through a raccoon and his friends has been such fun experience, especially as each season brought about a new chapter in their latest adventures.
My love of the genre hit a high note with their Chillhop Essentials: Spring 2020 mix. Just as many of us were told to leave work and school in order to socially distance at home, Chillhop became my family's soundtrack. My daughter and I watched the Spring 2020 track on repeat, the bossa nova beats were fun, the animation was whimsical and bright. It was something to look forward to while we navigated the uncertainty of the coming months. And to be honest, Chillhop and lofi music didn't just get me through the pandemic, it got me through:
- Adjusting to a new city and job
- My promotion and tenure journey
- My return to graduate school
Music Therapy
And there's research to back this up. Music therapy as a healing art goes back centuries and across global cultures (Thaut, 2015). Music therapy in the hospital setting has shown to relax patients, lower their self-reported pain and anxiety levels (Golino et al., 2019). Most recently, hospital workers assessed whether combining analgesics with lofi musc therapy would lower pain intensity and blood pressure in post operative patients. Daroin et al. (2022) applied this intervention (analgesics + lofi) and (analgesics + no lofi) among 36 post-operative patients (mostly female) and found that using lofi music therapy reduced self-reported pain levels, but not blood pressure. Outside of the clinical setting, a mixed-methods study of 76 Indian young adults, ages 21 to 25 years old, showed that listening to lofi music help reduce anxiety (Dsouza, 2024). In short, there are benefits to listening to music in order to help regulate our nervous system. So pick your poison medicine/music of choice? Mine just happens to be lofi ◝(ᵔᗜᵔ)◜.
My Favorite Playlists
I really love all of their playlists, especially their seasonal essentials mix and live streams, but there are some I like to listen on repeat. Below are just a few that I hope you check out.
- ...and it's Monday again
- Endless Sunday
- In the Zone
- Instant Energy Boost
- Chill Essentials: Spring 2020
Chillhop Friends: A Super Short History*
I've listened to Chillhop Music tracks going back to 2017 when there was no Raccoon. From what I could see, the Raccoon debuted in Fall 2018 swinging on a tire, living its best life, yet to have its cadre of friends. Spring 2019 was the first in the series where the Raccoon was joined by other furry friends, but they weren't quite hanging out together in the same scene. That would happen in Spring 2021 with the arrival of the Toucan. Summer 2021 brought a new friend, a windsurfing Bunny and Fall 2021 brought in a parasailing Bear. The gang would finally come together in Spring 2022 with the debut of Chillville, the fictional city where they moved to after leaving the countryside (see Fall 2024). Again, the lore in this series is so vast it's worthy of it's own blog post.
So there you have it, a beautifully woven storytelling series of a Raccoon, his friends, and the music that brings it all to life, or is it the other way around?
Anyway, Chillhop is celebrating 10 years this year and I wish I would have known y'all since Day 1. I can attest that as I wrote this post, I was listening to the new Spring 2026 mix, Solar Punk mix, and Best of Essentials Spring on repeat. Thank you for the many years that y'all have helped out the stressed student, the anxious (can't always focus) worker, the parent looking for calming music, the person looking for cleaning and tidying up music, the indy lofi artist, but really, everyone. Here's to many more playlists and adventures in the Chillville/Chillhop universe.
*I don't know the specific names of each characters, shame on me, so I've just used their animal identifiers.
References
Daroin, M. F., Wiyono, J., & Kom, S. (2022). The effect of Lo-Fi music therapy on pain intensity and blood pressure in post-operation patients in Karsa Husada Batu Hospital. International Journal Of Scientific Advances, 3(5), 725-729.
Dsouza, M. P., Shetty, A., TS, S., Damodar, P., Albuquerque Pai, A., Joyline Mathias, R., ... & Tanya Lewis, N. (2024). ‘I would want to listen to it as a medicine’–Lo-fi music and state anxiety, a mixed-methods pilot study on young adults. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 29(1), 2388787.
Golino, A. J., Leone, R., Gollenberg, A., Christopher, C., Stanger, D., Davis, T. M., ... & Friesen, M. A. (2019). Impact of an active music therapy intervention on intensive care patients. American journal of critical care, 28(1), 48-55.
Thaut, M. H. (2015). Music as therapy in early history. Progress in brain research, 217, 143-158.
AW