Game news Star Wars, Cyberpunk… the major licenses at the heart of a strange musical phenomenon on YouTube, what are these “POV” videos?
On YouTube, to accompany your evenings alone, these channels offer you very special ambient music inspired by your favorite worlds.
A trend born in the 90s, Lo-Fi music has gradually invaded music streaming platforms with its melodies inherited from the first pieces of the American group Madvillain, the experimental approach of J. Dilla and the jazz notes of Nujabes. If the Lo-Fi Girl of YouTube is probably the unshakable standard today, attracting more than 13 million subscribers, a few thousand other amateurs are trying their hand at the genre, made popular by masses of students and workers who like to work in the company of these compositions, thinking their productivity boosted. The very writing of the first lines of this article is carried by the muffled percussions and wordless hip-hop beats of a Lo-Fi video called “The perfect music to be productive”. Some dare to consider this music as therapy for generation Z, lending it the calming virtues that we already recognize in classical music.
Some major video game studios have also engaged in the practice. Square Enix published two months earlier a summary of an hour of piano notes that can be heard in the parts of the Final Fantasy saga. Some proposals reach millions of views on the YouTube platform, constituting a potential livelihood for those motivated to invest a few hundred euros monthly on cloud servers, which simultaneously upload high-quality audio continuously. The market seems almost imperishable, taking advantage of an increasingly entrenched solitary culture of staying at home and almost unanimous enthusiasm. A quick glance at Google Trend – an engine that analyzes the popularity of the main search queries in Google Search – reveals that Lo-Fi begins a meteoric rise around the world from 2015 on the web without ever fading. And naturally, like any self-respecting large-scale phenomenon, its success generates some very particular variants and sub-genres.
Lo-what?
The terms lo-fi have their roots in garage rock and the songs of certain punk and psych groups from the 60s and 70s. They are in fact the abbreviation of “low fidelity” (“low fidelity” in French), a reference in reality far from being pejorative made to the poor quality of the recordings of the melodies, which is largely their character, offering all the melancholy atmosphere that emanates from it. Since the 2010s, we have more generally associated the terms lo-fi with the tens of thousands of soothing music that can easily be found on YouTube. The pioneers of Lo-Fi remain Guided by Voices, Pavement and Daniel Johnson.
Lo-Fi POV, the ultimate level of a musical phenomenon
If you are, like me, a very regular consumer of Lo-fi music on YouTube, the algorithm has probably fed it abundantly to the point of recommending more and more surprising suggestions to you. This is how the platform one day offered me “a playlist to feel inside a Hopper painting”, assigning well-known music to several cult paintings which, in fact, would make me want to dive head first into some of them. A few more clicks later take me to a five-hour compilation called “1940 – A Summer Evening, Sitting on the Porch, It’s Raining” which has surpassed a million views. So many delicious and unique discoveries which in fact mark the intersection between two trends boosted by the younger generations: Lo-Fi and POV content, short for Point of View. The latter, notably seen on social networks such as Tik Tok, adopt a particular point of view, giving rise to all kinds of more or less original situations. And since the genre seems to fully embrace the art of painting, it seemed natural that it should also flirt with other media, such as video games and cinema. My oldest discovery is probably this video called “POV: You dance with Howl, but he slowly falls in love with you”, which refers to a main character in the film Howl’s Moving Castle by Hayao Miyazaki and compiles dozens of bucolic melodies that can even be listened to on the Spotify platform.
A bit more fun this time, the POV Ambients channel publishes a slew of playlists inspired by key characters from popular culture placed in extremely specific situations, one of the most popular being “POV: You are about to betray the Jedi Order”. The author also offers the “Study with” series, which consists of several musical moods promising to give you the feeling that the Joker, Darth Vader or Dr. House are peeping over your shoulder while you carefully compose your essay. As for video games, the trend also currently prefers to immerse itself in very fashionable universes that are already well known for their immersive qualities. So it wasn’t very difficult to come across a few videos paying homage to the world of Cyberpunk 2077. The Cyberpunk Ambience channel, for example, published “POV: You are sitting outside at a party on a rooftop in Night City “, but you will find a more soothing suggestion on the cash gold loans channel, called “It’s 2077, it’s raining outside and you’re relaxing in your apartment in Night City.”
Horror games are also entitled to their homage. This is how the StarLinkwaves channel offers you the following situation: “I’m in Silent Hill, but it’s 4 a.m.”, consisting of a thirty-minute melody tinged with solitude which seems to soften many listeners. “I don’t know if I’m weird, but hearing this type of dark ambient music during the late hours of the night brings me so much peace… it’s a type of peace of mind that I can’t have the day“, said one of them. Other suggestions on the fly, and a little less gloomy: the loopi channel published two years ago a compilation of music from Animal Crossing: City Folk titled “To a Rainy Town in Animal Crossing City Folk”. The Cry Café chain offers its side more than an hour of jazz background musicpromising the illusion of being leaned against the café counter in Persona 5. If the idea appeals to you, then type your favorite game followed by the terms “POV Lo-fi” into the YouTube search bar and you may find -be some treasures for your lonely evenings.