Genre Report: Can the Ambient Music Boom Withstand AI?

This analysis is part of Billboard’s music technology newsletter Machine Learnings. Sign up for Machine Learnings, and other Billboard newsletters for free here.

What is ambient? If you take genre pioneer Brian Eno’s word for it, it is music designed to be “as ignorable as it is interesting.”

Generally, ambient music is recognized as anything from Max Richter, Jon Hopkins and Aphex Twin to wellness soundscapes and binural beats. It can be jazz inflected, like Nala Sinephro’s Continuous; it can sample folk classics, like Eno and Fred again..’s “Come On Home”; or it can double as a popular TV score, like Hildur Guonadottir’s “12 Hours Before” for HBO’s Chernobyl. It can be made up of field recordings, or sounds from a synthesizer.

Among this amorphous group of instrumentals is a corner of the music business that has worked differently than any other genre. Ambient is often enjoyed in the background for a functional purpose — like meditating, sleeping, focusing or just getting lost in the sound. This means that even the most popular artists in the genre have generally not become stars in their own right. But there is still serious money to be made — and the industry is starting to catch on.

Now, as more mainstream stars like Floating Points, André 3000, Fred Again.. and others put their spin on the genre, sleep playlists gain top audiences, and wellness culture continues to rise, this once forgotten corner of the industry is experiencing a significant boom. Could AI and new streaming policies stop the surge?

The shift in the ambient and instrumental music business could arguably be traced back to the rise of streaming and editorial playlists. In 2016, Music Business Worldwide was the first to write that Spotify was allegedly hiring producers for a flat fee to create tracks which fit certain themes in an effort to fill out some of their, mostly instrumental, playlists. These tracks were then allegedly uploaded under pseudonyms. (Spotify denied this at the time). In January, those allegations about so-called “ghost artists” were brought to the forefront again by author Liz Pelly in her book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, which argued that playlists, like Ambient Chill on Spotify, had apparently been stuffed with company-owned stock music.

“Since editorial playlists formed, there’s been a very steady rise in consumption for ambient,” says Brando Hartt, client services-A&R, ambient and lo-fi, for Downtown Artist and Label Services. Streamers weren’t the only ones that noticed. In recent years, a number of new labels have emerged to capture the growing interest in ambient-related music, though they are often not like traditional labels. Many are playing what Hartt calls a “volume game,” releasing a deluge of quickly-made tracks, often bought out from the producers that created them, with the sole hope of clinching a playlist feature. Because of this approach, those label owners — two of whom, when contacted by Billboard, declined to discuss their operations — often do their work quietly. “It’s such a passive genre typically so pretty much all of your listens will come from these playlists if you get on them,” Hartt says.

In recent years, Billboard has reported that editorial playlists don’t drive streams the way they once did for mainstream genres like pop and rap — but that’s certainly not true for ambient music. The Sleep Sounds playlist on Apple Music, described as “sedate, ambient and atmospheric,” is the streamer’s No. 1 playlist on a daily basis. In fact, eight of the top 20 playlists on Apple Music are some form of ambient or wellness playlist.

Corey Gordon knows what it’s like to see the overnight success of a sleep playlist feature. In 2020, while studying at the University of Southern California, he decided to self-release his first ambient EP, ambi tape, to streaming services. “At first, I was getting about 15 plays a day, a very casual listening base,” he says. Until one day he remembers checking Spotify For Artists to find he had “15,000 current listeners.” He struck gold — the final track on his project, “Ambi 25,” ended up on a playlist called “Deep Sleep,” earning him millions of plays on Spotify in the span of about five months. Still, he says, “the playlists I was on didn’t help cultivate any sort of audience for my music that actually stuck.”

As someone who had been following L.A.’s ambient scene long before he started making the music himself, Gordon says he noticed even more increasing interest in the genre during the pandemic. “I think it was a natural reaction to the chaos of the world — wanting some kind of meditative, sublime listening experience,” he says.

The founders of pop/R&B label Avant Garden, Azad Naficy and Brittany Crawford, also found solace in ambient and wellness music during the pandemic, spurring them to start Peace of Mind Studio in 2020. Unlike some of the other new ambient labels which were just pumping out tracks, they wanted to take a small-batch approach and give the music the respect they felt it deserved. “I thought, how do we put the same attention to detail and level of care we’ve put into our other [projects] into mood music?” says Naficy. “What was happening then wasn’t very inspiring.”

Peace of Mind tried a novel approach, encouraging some of the artists signed to Avant Garden, like Chiiild’s Yonatan Ayal, to make ambient projects, and providing them with creative direction and marketing support as well as signing traditional ambient acts. “The pandemic was hard. At the time, everything was stopped, and this became some of [our artists’] main projects,” says Crawford. “We know so many great musicians who we felt their talent far outweighed the amount of monetary success they had. It was exciting to try these projects with people who we felt really had a solid foundation in wellness and meditation already and encourage them to write from that experience.”

Naficy and Crawford say they now have multiple signees making over half a million a year from their ambient side projects, which now help fund their other creative endeavors. But it’s not just a money grab; for Ayal, it’s just another outlet to flex his production skills. “I love this genre of music. It just goes in waves and takes you to places you can’t anticipate,” he says. “There’s something so nice about exploring that.”

The growing popularity of ambient music doesn’t just live online. It also is palpable at live shows, says Gordon. L.A. ambient stalwart Leaving Records, for example, had to move their monthly park performances to a new space after the COVID lockdown was lifted, citing growing crowds. Lo-fi/ambient label Arden Records also started beefing up their live events, including a partnership with Moto Yoga to provide live music for meditation sessions. As Arden Records co-founder Jordan Smith explains, live events like theirs are “one of the most effective ways we can build a community and brand around our artists.”

Now, marketing methods are showing signs of evolution. Flawed Mangoes, an ambient guitarist known for pioneering the subgenre “Hope Core,” is often cited as an artist who has effectively thrown out this playbook. He signed to APG over a small tastemaker label. His work regularly goes viral on TikTok accompanying video compilations of nostalgic or hopeful images (hence the name). He’s done street interviews with rap bloggers like On The Radar to reach new fans. “We had to think outside the box,” says Sam Moreland, director of marketing for APG. “We had to find a way to tie a face and identity to the instrumental.”

“Flawed Mangoes proves you can actually build a fan base and have a whole social presence around this kind of music,” says Sagun, a producer and co-founder of Arden Records, says. “I don’t see it as just lean-back listening anymore.”

Though the business brains behind the ambient boom feel “there’s so much more that can be done in this genre,” as Naficy puts it, its growth still faces serious challenges ahead, like the rise of generative AI. Companies like Endel, which is considered to be ethically trained AI, have gained traction with products that generate ambient soundscapes to support various functions, including focus and sleep, in real time. Endel has also forged partnerships with Grimes, James Blake, 6lack and Warner Music Group to further disseminate its AI-powered sounds. Other non-wellness-focused AI music platforms like Suno and Udio, which are currently being sued by the major music companies for widespread copyright infringement, are also able to generate ambient music, especially more simplistic soundscapes, at a click of a button.

Changes to the streaming model also pose a risk. In the last few years, Lucian Grainge, the chairman/CEO of Universal Music Group, has spoken out multiple times against “functional music” or “non-music,” including bird sounds, white noise and other sounds that generate billions of streams on DSPs, sometimes while listeners are asleep. Grainge would like to see it earn a lesser royalty than traditional music. “Our industry is entering a new chapter where we’re going to have to pick sides, all of us are going to have to pick sides,” he said at Billboard’s Power 100 event in 2023 ”Are we on the side of…functional music, functional content? Or are we on the side of artistry and artists?”

With ambient, which is a wide-ranging and experimental genre, it’s hard to draw a line between where noise ends and music begins. “I hate that stance,” says Smith. “We’ve done a lot of nature stuff, including a project with the National Parks, where we’ve released nature sounds. Our artists will go on a hike and field record it. They’ve spent time, effort and energy into that. They shouldn’t be penalized because it’s a different way of listening.”

Companies like Arden, Peace of Mind and other newcomers will not be deterred. Arden Records is now opening a publishing side of its business to capture the untapped songwriter market in lo-fi and ambient, and Peace of Mind continues to sign new talent and dream of a future when the genre goes truly mainstream.

“In 10 years, if we keep going on the path we are on, there’s going to be a stage at Coachella for ambient,” Naficy says. “Can you imagine how great that would be?”