The Ultimate List Of Work And Study Music

I can’t work in silence. And if I’m working with words — which is most of the time — I can’t work while playing typical pop, rock or hip-hop. So I collect instrumental and foreign-language music on a scale better measured by weeks than by hours. Here are some of my greatest sources of background music for work, studying, and creativity.

Recommendation Lists

  • Flow State: This is my very favourite way to get new background music. Daily newsletter recommending instrumental albums and DJ mixes, with focuses on contemporary classical, ambient, and electronic music. Excellent curation with descriptions of each album. Most recommendations are available on Spotify and YouTube. Personally, I load all their recommendations into a gigantic playlist and hit shuffle.

  • 40 Cosmic Rock Albums: Music lovers have posted over 47,000 lists on Rate Your Music, and this is the list that helped me discover prog rock and its offshoots. This soaring, often instrumental genre is a great backdrop for reading sci-fi and fantasy. I personally believe Pink Floyd’s “Atom Heart Mother” suite fits Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy as much as Dark Side of the Moon fits The Wizard of Oz.

Spotify and Apple Music Playlists

  • Instrumental Study: This official Spotify playlist includes dozens of artists with only a couple of tracks to their name, but all 146 songs sound like they could be on the same album. Every track is a soft, gentle piano piece, like something a character in The English Patient would play in an empty manor house on a rainy day in a flashback. This music will not distract you. It might make you feel like a page of Chicken Soup for the Soul.

  • Focus and Study: Search either of these two terms on Spotify and click the top result. You’ll get full genre pages full of Spotify-curated playlists. Browse around to find the right mood.

  • Pure Focus: This official Apple Music playlist has 100 rotating tracks of mostly beat-driven electronica. For a more free-flowing sound, try Pure Ambient.

  • If you use Apple Music, you can follow my giant playlist of instrumental and non-English-vocals music. You’ll run into some stuff that’s not at all conducive to work. But it’s 6.5 solid days of music (and counting), so you can keep hitting “skip” and never run out.

Websites

  • Poolside FM: Chill beats and silent 80s ads inside a retro Mac interface. The site currently features four channels: Poolside FM, Friday Nite Heat, Hangover Club, and Tokyo Disco. You can also subscribe to weekly emails with new tunes.

  • Headphone Commute: Music news and review site covering new instrumental music, leaning toward electronica and ambient. A lot of the music here is melancholy, fit for a late-night drive. If our other recommendations feel too chipper, this is your groove. Follow Headphone Commute’s frequently updated Spotify playlist, which is archived into a new playlist each month.

  • Chill But Lit: The web app JQBX lets you sync with other Spotify users in a virtual room, and DJ for each other over the internet. This popular JQBX room plays only chill lounge beats with minimal vocals. You can export the room’s song history into a Spotify playlist for solo listening.

YouTube

  • My Analogue Journal: This stuff is what every café should be playing in the background. A YouTube channel full of vintage instrumental and foreign-language DJ mixes. Each mix is an hour or more, and you can string them together with this YouTube playlist. (Their videos get taken down sometimes, so you might have to skip forward in the playlist.)

  • Magical Mystery Mix: YouTube channel with international hip-hop, jazz, and vintage Japanese pop.

  • The Lifehacker Lonely Nostalgia Collection: YouTubers like to run classic songs through dampeners and other filters to make them sound far-off, like they’re drifting through an empty mall. With everything muffled and softened, you can bathe in nostalgia for the music without being distracted by the lyrics.

  • Marcel the Drunkard: This sketch and watercolor artist draws on-camera under the sounds of jazz, fusion, prog rock, and Japanese pop. My favourite video is set to Doctor Pizza’s Late Night Delivery.

Artists and Albums

  • Brian Eno: A lot of Eno’s experimental music is too distracting to work by, but his ambient work is essential. Eno coined the term “ambient music” for his album Ambient 1: Music for Airports. See 15 of his ambient albums listed at Ambient Music Guide.

  • Long Ambients: Natalie Portman’s great-uncle Moby has released two free ambient albums.

  • Áine O’Dwyer: Spotify and Apple Music only carry her album Gallarais, but you should pick up her Bandcamp album, Music for Church Cleaners. I love to pretend I’m quietly scribbling in a notebook in the back pew while the organ player rehearses. The track “The Little Lord of Misrule” does contain some vocals by a distant and presumably naughty child.

  • Floex: Dreamy electronic/acoustic fusion; my favourites are A Portrait of John Doe (a dramatic collaboration with Tom Hodge and the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra) and the soundtrack to the mystical point-and-click adventure Samorost 3.

  • Bonobo: For when you run out of Floex.

  • Béla Fleck: For the opposite of electronica, try his banjo duet album Double Time, or his international collaboration with Jie-Bing Chen and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Tabula Rasa.

  • Philip Glass: This contemporary composer’s music feels mathematical, energetically repetitive, fractal. You might recognise it from Battlestar Galactica, Notes on a Scandal, The Hours, or The Truman Show, but his work is primarily standalone, or played over dialog-free films like Koyaanisqatsi. My current favourite is Lavinia Meijer’s spare arrangements for harp on The Glass Effect. I also recommend Glass Piano and the more exciting but distracting Powaqqatsi.

  • Tito Puente: As long as you don’t speak Spanish, you can get stuff done to his latin jazz collections like Mambo With Me and Para los Rumberos. If the lyrics are too distracting, try the swinging instrumental collection Jazzify.

Soundtracks

There’s enough world-class “productivity music” to soundtrack an entire career. Which ironically means that you can waste hours on end finding what’s juuust right for the current task — even if you’re leafing through your own hand-picked catalogue. It’s a good problem to have. So please, give me more to try!

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