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On March 18, 2015, the Lofi Girl channel joined YouTube . The channel is one of the most popular ways to experience the genre. The channel streams similar music around the clock, as well as themed playlists. As of November 2021, the channel has over 940 million views.
Lo-Fi aesthetics often take the Vaporwave color palette and images related to the anime aesthetic and then use different tones and vintage-style filters. Colors that normally appear bright in photos and drawings will instead be unsaturated and muted, resulting in an aged or faded look. The use of pastels is also commonly incorporated into Lo-Fi visuals, often giving the visuals a dreamy, nostalgic look. As with Lo-Fi music, the deliberate degradation of image quality is also common. Techniques such as adding visual noise, reducing contrast and even chromatic aberration can be used for this purpose. Although easily confused with Vaporwave, there are a few key differences between the two, particularly the more common use of computer and surrealistic environments in Vaporwave combined with very saturated colors.
Lately, much of the Indie aesthetic seems to take a lot of notes from the Lo-Fi aesthetic, so it's easy to confuse the two, but the most important difference is that Indie tends to have more of a rock flavor to its aesthetic, while Lo-Fi can go in a slightly popish direction.
There are many major genres of Lo-Fi music, but they all have the feature of intensely using deliberate sound quality degradation to achieve a more analog feel. High frequencies are also usually avoided or minimized with things like EQ and low-pass filters, resulting in a muted low-intensity aura. Some of the types of Lo-Fi genres include seasonal mixes as well as feelings (like sadness, loneliness and joy). Summer Lo-Fi mixes are the most common.
Much more popular of the Lo-Fi music aesthetic, Lo-Fi Hip-Hop is a predominantly instrumental genre primarily designed to evoke feelings of nostalgia or tranquility. This genre typically features songs with a low to medium tempo of 70 to 90 beats
per minute, with 85 being a particularly common choice among artists. Excerpts from anime or other sources of recorded speech are often inserted into this music, and although much less common, singing and rapping also occasionally appear in this genre. It should not be confused with chillhop, a closely related subgenre of jazz-based hip-hop, which uses much less intentional sound deterioration and instead typically displays higher tempos, crisper mixes, and more resilient properties. Chillshop also doesn't avoid high frequencies as much as Lo-Fi. Lo-Fi is often used to help focus while studying, writing, reading, or performing other independent activities that require concentration. Performers in this genre include:
- Idealism
- SwuM
- Smoke Trees
- eevee
- Kazam
Of course, a lesser known genre of Lo-Fi, Lo-Fi House has been described as listening to music played in a nightclub from the outside. Lo-Fi House tends to draw many musical cues and inspiration from 80s and 90s house music, but still retains the sense of nostalgia and relaxation found in its hip-hop counterpart. Performers in the genre include:
- DJ Windows XP/DJ Windows 7.
- DJ Seinfeld
- Ross From Friends
- Bruce Trail
- Mall Grab
Chillwave (sometimes called Lo-Fi Synthwave or Glo-Fi) is a musical micro-genre that emerged in the late 2000s. It is characterized by a muted or dreamy (or Lo-Fi) retro-pop sound, escapist lyrics (frequent themes include beach or summer), psychedelic or Lo-Fi aesthetic, soft vocals, low to moderate tempos, heavy effects processing (especially reverb) and vintage synths. Because of its overall aesthetic choices, Chillwave is often confused with Vaporwave (even more confusing when Vaporwave is sometimes referred to as a sub-genre of Chillwave).
Chillwave loosely mimics '80s electropop and uses notions of memory and nostalgia. It was one of the first music genres to develop primarily through the Internet. The term was coined in 2009 by the satirical blog Hipster Runoff to describe indie performers whose sounds resembled music from 1980s VHS tapes. Among his most famous performers were Neon Indian, Washed Out and Toro y Moi, which caught the eye during the 2009 performance of "Summer of Chillwave." The 2009 Washed Out track "Feel It All Around" remains Chillwave's best-known song. Performers in the genre include:
- Ariel Pink
- Ducktails
- HOME
- Hotel Pools
- Keep Shelly In Athens
- Memory Tapes
- MillionYoung
- Neon Indian
- Pictureplane
- Small Black
- Stumbleine
- Toro y Moi
- Tycho
- Washed Out
- Shiloh Dynasty