Other beats to study/work to

Happy Monday everyone! To help you start your work week, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite YouTube DJs/music creators that I play in the background while I work.

Primavera recap and festival guide coming on Thursday, so subscribe to the Yapper tier if you’d like to read it.

In a simpler time when I was 21 and (briefly) living in beautiful Los Angeles, California, I met this guy and we exchanged Instagram handles. The city (and world) shut down because of Covid-19 soon after this, and for some reason, he sent me a DM with a link to the YouTube channel for LoFi Girl and her daily livestream of beats to study/work to.

“I got a feeling you’d vibe to this,” he said. I think it was an attempt to flirt with me (in the middle of a panny?!) but I thought it was so funny. Of course I had heard of LoFi Girl, who hadn’t? Is she supposed to make me feel better while the world was ending? But I didn’t actually check out her stuff because I wasn’t interested in listening to that kind of music.

Last year, I finally came around to listening to lofi beats to study/work to and unfortunately it did help me lock in. I can’t work with normal music because the lyrics always distract me, so I usually work in silence. But I’ve always felt understimulated in silence so LoFi Girl was perfect. Damn it!

In the time since I first put LoFi Girl on, I’ve been served a lot of similar YouTube channels of what is essentially background music. But! I realized after a while that a lot of them seemed to be AI-generated, which y’all know I don’t like. Sometimes it’s hard to tell since the music is already so sparse, but I think if a channel is pumping out a lot of content quickly and the actual track IDs are hard to pin down, it’s a red flag.

So, I’ve switched to mostly live DJ sets, with the exception of one jazz musician, to soundtrack my work. Here is a list of my favorites below, if you’d like to take a gander:

Josh Santana

This guy rocks. He does jazz covers of pop albums from artists like Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter, and Chappell Roan. These are my favorite to put on loop.

Humano Studios 

Sometimes I like the movement of an actual live DJ set, in the same way people like to just have the TV on in the background. This channel features a lot of different DJs with a range of sounds, but I like the funky ones best!

Denz1000

I don’t know what it is about this guy, but his mixes make me lock the fuck in. Scratch that — I know why. He puts a lot of video game music in his sets, which makes it feel like my work is a quest to complete. He also put me on to rally house.

見本盤Mihon Reko

This vinyl listening bar in China posts its DJs’ sets on YouTube and they are great. They mostly play jazz, which I like to put on for ambiance. The videos are also quite dark and have little movement, so they aren’t as distracting as some of the other channels.

Black House Radio

I always come back to this specific Zack Fox set from Black House Radio, but I love the house party element of this channel.

Every Monday letter gets a playlist. Today, some cuts from the electronic artists I saw last week.

In this week’s playlist:

• All My People - Confidence Man

• Tommy - Fcukers

• Bloodwork - The Dare

• High Time - 4AM Kru

• FREAKY - Sharelle

• Control - Frost Children

• Romantika - Brutalismus 3000

• Love You Got - Kelly Lee Owens