The Pop Corporation

We’re not sure it’s great news for a musician to be told that your work is sending people to sleep. Honestly, you’d rather here it’s caused raging impotence wouldn’t you? Unless you’re the Penguin Cafe Orchestra or something. Either way, this is the news that the likes of Billlie Eilish, BTS, and Khalid have woken up to.

According to a study published by researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark, they analysed 225,626 tracks from 985 Spotify playlists that related to sleep. After crunching the numbers and data, they then used Spotify’s software to compare sleep songs and that. So, you’d assume slower, quieter music would score heavily, right? Their findings (shared in journal PLOS One) showed more diversity than that.

It said that they “investigated the characteristics of music used for sleep and found that even though sleep music, in general, is softer, slower, instrumental and more often played on acoustic instruments than other music, the music people use for sleep displays a large variation, including music characterised by high energy and tempo.”

Of course, there was loads of ambient/gentle music in there, but featuring was songs like ‘Dynamite’ by BTS. Eilish writes some slow music, in her defence.

“The study can both inform the clinical use of music and advance our understanding of how music is used to regulate human behaviour in everyday life,” the team behind the study added.

So there you go. Hearing that your music is sending folk to sleep? Or familiarity is comforting?