Falling asleep is easy for some people. For others, we’re constantly struggling to find the perfect bedtime routine to help them nod to dreamland. will try anything. This includes a carefully curated sleep playlist by someone who ensures this music is the key to the final snooze. But what is good sleep music? New study says , analyzed hundreds of Spotify sleep playlists to find the Sandman equivalent of music.
A new research study looked at Spotify sleep playlists to find out what kind of music people listen to. … [+]
Researchers from Denmark’s Aarhus University and the Royal Academy of Music searched Spotify for playlists they created to help people fall asleep. They collected nearly 1000 playlists with over 100 subscribers to see if there was a specific type of music people listened to while trying to fall asleep.
Overall, these playlists contained over 200,000 tracks. As expected from the sleep playlist, many of these were instrumental tracks, slow music and not too loud. The largest category the researchers identified was “ambient music.” But there were also several other categories of music, including surprisingly loud or fast-paced tracks like BTS’s “Dynamite” and Billie Eilish and Khalid’s “Lovely.”
This isn’t the first study to try to find out what kind of music puts us to sleep, and it’s not the first time the results have been a little unexpected.
Some studies have found that listening to music before bed can help you fall asleep, but the music people like isn’t necessarily the best for a restful night. For example, according to his 2021 study from Baylor University, people can wake up in the middle of the night with a song stuck in their head, so it’s not a good idea to listen to catchy tunes before bed. But, of course, people were still doing it. Sleep researcher Michael Scullin, who led the earworm study, told Baylor University:
Perhaps that also means that Spotify’s sleep playlist doesn’t actually contain good music for sleep. After all, what prevents you from adding a catchy song to your sleep playlist or subscribing to a playlist with a few upbeat tunes, even if you can’t determine exactly which music helps you sleep? is nothing.
A new study from Denmark could only see which playlists people subscribed to, not how well listeners actually slept. However, in their research paper, the researchers suggest that there may be a reason for listening to fast, loud music before bed. and sleep can be argued to be counterproductive,” they wrote. In other words, maybe you just want to listen to your favorite music at the end of the day.
So we still don’t know exactly what music actually is good But this study at least narrowed down what I listen to before bed. And in the future, it may help other researchers figure out what aspects of music actually make you fall asleep and stay asleep.