15+ AI-free background jams to throw on before your next creative session
This playlist has everything: lofi, house, ambient, R&B, Ethio-jazz, and more!
I love to put on background music while I’m doing something creative, both to fill the silence and to create a cozy atmosphere. But, embarrassingly, unless I’m really in the zone, I struggle to write when there are English lyrics playing around me; the words just get in the way.
Here, I’ll often turn to instrumental music, songs with vocals so quiet they’re virtually incomprehensible, or international tunes in other languages. (I once defaulted to turning on the Wii Shop Channel song or music from Animal Crossing when I needed a bit of background sound, but even those catchy earworms grow tiring after a while.) Single tracks are inconvenient, though, because having to locate the next song and then another breaks the creative flow I’m working so hard to set in motion. So I look for streams and playlists…except many of them are fake.
While aesthetically pleasing at first glance, most of the trendy-looking, single-visual or barely-animated playlists you’ll find on YouTube are AI-generated, which explains why these channels are able to pump out so many videos in a short period of time, as well as why the tracks begin to sound a bit samey after a few minutes.
This is a huge bummer for us creative folks who, you know, believe in originality and the artistic process and all that. Even if a playlist is just running in the background, I’d like to know that I’m supporting a real person’s work as I write. So, over time, I’ve assembled a list of YouTubers whose work is verifiably human-made. These range from spacey atmospheric sound and harp solos to Latin grooves and jazzy house mixes, offering a variety of emotional soundscapes to suit just about any project.
Here’s how I determine whether a jam is human-made, with steps ranked from easy to lowkey annoying:
If I can literally watch a person create it in real-time, it’s probably human-made.1 This is why I typically stick to YouTube when I’m looking for more than just a single track: video is essential here.2
Better yet, if I’ve seen the artist or DJ play at a real-life venue, I don’t have to worry.
If I can find the artist elsewhere on the internet under a real name or a stage name, that’s encouraging, too. Many AI-generated music channels are called something like D O W N T O W N or Fruit. and don’t include artist, composer, or DJ names in their video descriptions or channel bio.
If the playlist or DJ offers the names of the tracks, artists, and/or albums they’re playing and I can find a couple of those tracks on the artist’s website or a streaming platform under their name, things look pretty legit.
Written out like this, it all sounds a bit exhausting, but in reality it only takes a minute or two max to check whether an hour-plus video is a real person’s (or group’s!) creative work.
Anyway, on to the AI-free background music recommendations! Most of these are 1-2 hours long, so they won’t interrupt your flow until it’s time for a “bio break.”3 I hope they serve your next crafting, coding, journaling, reading, studying, or writing session well.
Upbeat house & jazz
Lo-fi
Spacey ambient sound
Bossa nova
Chill R&B (with the best video titles of all time)
Ethio-jazz & afro-latin grooves
Relaxing single-instrument sessions
There are several videos I couldn’t include here because the post would be too long. I’m adding to my playlist all the time, so if you want to see everything I’ve saved so far, click here!
Happy creating! ♪〜
I suppose you could argue that generative AI is so advanced now that some videos could contain fake clips depicting fake musicians, or that a real person is pretending to play the guitar while an AI track runs, but you have to remember that people who use AI to “create” art are lazy. Why would they go to those lengths when making still-image AI playlists is clearly very lucrative?
It’s also adds a little environmental je ne sais quoi to have a fun video on your TV or computer monitor while you do something else! (Though I encourage you to put your screen in “sleep” mode if you’d find this distracting.)
My mom hates this term. Hi Mom!