LOFI AND COMMUNITY
This was a paper I wrote for a Culture and Communication in Virtual Learning Environments course.
Do you listen to music when you work?
I do — anything to make work seem a little less like… work.
Whenever I write for example, I look for something instrumental — jazz or classical, perhaps. Anything with words is a bit distracting.
Lofi certainly fits under this umbrella of productivity-friendly music. You’ve probably heard of it, but here’s a link just in case.
Driven by “subtle, complex, and soothing rhythms” (Discover Magazine), lofi just seems to flow seamlessly with anything one might be doing. It’s an excellent choice for background music.
I can’t be the only one who feels this way. ChilledCow — one of the top lofi channels on YouTube — has almost 12 million subscribers.
The cow (or are their multiple cows?) run 2 YouTube Live streams which play lofi non-stop. Both are consistently among YouTube’s most popular Live videos — at the time of this sentence, more than 43,000 people around the world were tuned in!
Plenty has been said about the lofi phenomenon in the last few years. My intention here is not to repeat the good work which has already been done, but rather to look more closely at the role played by YouTube Live in all of this — one of the platforms upon which lofi has been able to thrive.
YOUTUBE LIVE 101
YouTube Live was introduced in April 2011, designed to allow content creators to engage with their audience in real-time.
Nowadays, Live is used to broadcast anything from video game streams and news to concerts, sports, cooking food, eating food, and so much more. You can have a look for yourself at some featured Live videos — curated by YouTube.
Random observation — despite decently high viewership, ChilledCow streams never seem to be featured on that page for some reason…
Most Live streams feature a chat box beside the video. Chat messages are visible to everyone, even those who aren’t logged into YouTube — viewers do need to sign in though if they want to say something.
You can also (1) view a list of participants, (2) pop out the chat into a new tab, and (3) toggle timestamps on and off.
The chat itself is fairly basic — just text and emojis. You can tag someone by typing @name and according to YouTube, any messages sent this way will be highlighted on the recipient’s screen. Sadly, nobody has ever tagged me so I cannot confirm what this looks like…
There are “super” features as well. For example, viewers can pay to send exclusive animated images. They can also write a “Super Chat” and have one of the message pinned at the top for a set period of time — $500 will get you 5 hours of exposure!
Dedicated fans of a Live stream can also purchase Membership for a monthly fee. Doing so unlocks exclusive badges and emojis, as well as other perks based on what the channel offers.
THE ASPECT OF COMMUNITY
Now I’m probably just being cheap, but the fact that people actually pay for these sorts of things has never really made much sense to me.
Thinking about it now though, we need to recognize that there are those who have made careers out of creating content on YouTube, streaming on Twitch, influencing on Instagram, and so forth. Their success is driven by viewer — and community — support.
Community is something that lofi embodies — Discover Magazine wrote that anyone who turns on lofi might “instantly feel some sense of community”, so this must be true.
ChilledCow Members, for example, gain access to visual cues like chat badges and highlighted names. These serve to build, signal, and solidify their identity in the community.
Lofi has a global audience, is available 24/7, and based on some of the themes most common in the chat (that we’ll look at in a bit) — it really does seem to bring people together.
In fact, you or I could maybe make a lofi track ourselves. Critics of the genre point to this as proof of its banality, but others — such as Adam Harper, perhaps, in a 439-page (!) dissertation on lofi music — see this more positively as resistance to the commercialization of music.
Lofi is for the people, and by the people…
To dig deeper into all of this, I decided to lurk in this ChilledCow stream for a little bit.
THE ETERNAL STRUGGLE AGAINST PROCRASTINATION
It did not take long — nor was it very surprising — to see how productivity represented a prominent topic in the Live chat.
Viewers were quite open with their struggles to get work done, and the chat became a safe place to vent about this sort of stuff.
Perhaps even more importantly, the responses to these types of messages were overwhelmingly positive as well. Rather than judgment or shame, I observed many more instances of mutual support, experience sharing, advice.
POLICING
As expected, there was a bit of spam — mostly harmless though.
YouTube Live actually lets viewers toggle between “Top chat” and “Live chat”.
The first option uses automatic spam detection algorithms and keyword blocking to keep the feed relatively clean. Option 2 on the other hand was indeed more hectic — and less tame.
No computer system is perfect of course, which is where the community comes in!
Viewers can report or block others, and I actually managed to see cases where acts of community “policing” led to bans or deleted / retracted messages.
While there aren’t any specific norms or codes of conduct for YouTube Live besides some general Community Guidelines, certain things were considered no-no’s by ChilledCow viewers — including frequently repeated messages, advertisements, and hostile profanity.
GLOBAL NETWORK, CULTURAL EXCHANGE
English was the dominant language used in the chat, but messages written in other dialects were quite common too.
On several occasions, I also noticed viewers sharing their local times and locations.
It was also — for the lack of a cooler (hehe) word — cool to see some interesting cause and effect. One non-English message was likely to set off a chain of responses in that same language…
ESCALATION
There were times when chatters would suggest that everyone join another social channel. With how basic the YouTube Live chat system is in terms of functionality, I interpreted these situations as a desire amongst certain members of the community to take things to the next level.
More personal social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat were examples of what was asked for and exchanged.
Zoom meetings were brought up as well, although I do wonder if anyone actually joins these…
Actually, it turns out that ChilledCow has its own Discord channel.
As you may know, Discord is a much more nuanced and powerful chat solution. Users can private message or use voice, and channels can be organized into different topics— for example, the ChilledCow Discord has one for venting and another for photography.
The sense of community — as well as the rules of conduct — are much more explicit here too.
A REALIZATION
ChilledCow runs a merchandise store. It has accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Its most popular playlist on Spotify has almost 7 million followers.
What I’m trying to say here is that our exploration began with a focus on YouTube Live and it facilitates virtual community and kinship.
There was much to be observed indeed, but I think there’s a greater realization here. The sense of community among lofi listeners is tangible and evident, and not just on one single platform or channel — I guess now is the time to go back and rename this paper to “Lofi and Community” instead of “Youtube Live and Community”…
Happy listening everyone!
