The Cozy, Relaxing, Troubling Allure of Ambience Videos

Happy (early) birthday, YouTube. To celebrate the site’s 20th anniversary, we present: The InsideHook Guide to YouTube, a series of creator profiles, channel recommendations and deep dives about the viral, controversial, unstoppable video-sharing giant.

It’s no secret that social media has shredded our attention spans. All day long we swipe through 10-second TikToks, constantly refresh our email and scroll through an endless stream of Instagram posts — and those scatterbrained habits have had a delirious effect on our focus. In one ongoing study, researchers have been tracking how long the average person can focus on one task on a screen at work before switching to something else: In 2004, the average attention span was about two and a half minutes. In 2024, the average was just 47 seconds.

For some, the solution to this problem lies on social media itself.

Right this second, tens of thousands of people around the world are watching YouTube ambience videos. Well, the videos are playing, but watching may not be the right word. People put on these hours-long, high-quality animations set to music or some other soundscape (the noises of a coffee shop, for example) when they’re working, studying or simply going about their day. Sometimes they’re visible, sometimes they’re simply humming along in a hidden browser tab among a dozen open tabs.

Some of the most popular live-streamed videos in this genre, like those from the channel Lofi Girl, attract tens of thousands of listeners at once. Others, like the three-hour coffee shop scenes from the channel Relaxing Jazz Piano, rack up millions of views as people listen over and over again. As a listener, it’s easy to forget there’s even a video playing. In the aforementioned scene, titled “A Rainy Day in 4K Cozy Coffee Shop,” rain pounds on large-paneled windows that are illuminated by flickering candles while jazz music plays in the background. The animation feels alive, like you could blink and find yourself inside.

When our home offices, kitchen tables or cubicles feel stifling, these videos transport us to a new location, offering a backdrop that facilitates concentration. It’s been said many times that certain music can help us increase productivity, helping our focus and information retention. But there’s a reason people are increasingly turning to YouTube instead of their favorite music streaming service, according to Dr. Zari Taylor, a faculty fellow at New York University who studies digital and popular culture.

“It adds that visual quality, and that says more about the way that social media replaces other forms of traditional media, such as background TV or background shows,” Taylor tells InsideHook. “It’s more accessible, essentially, to have the Lofi Girl on in the background, or any kind of live video via YouTube.”

These videos have no advertisements or dialogue or changing scenes — the way TV or radio would — to draw our attention away from the task at hand. As for how these types of videos benefit YouTube, they’re a way to keep viewers locked in during the age of short attention spans; it’s a strategy other social platforms are eager to replicate.

I think [these videos represent] something that is of a different time, especially for Gen Z who don’t really remember life before social media.

– Dr. Zari Taylor, faculty fellow at NYU

In February 2022, TikTok increased its max video duration from three to 10 minutes, and just this summer, the platform started to test 60-minute videos. But even though apps like TikTok are trying to hold attention spans for longer periods of time, YouTube is still the place people seek out this type of content. After all, the maximum runtime on the video-sharing site is 12 hours, so just like the experience of sitting in a real coffee shop, you can press play on a cafe scene and live in it for 30 minutes or three hours — however long you want.

“You can draw out your productivity based on the length of the video, and that’s the appeal of it,” Taylor says. “It’s like, if I want to get work done for an hour, I’ll have this on in the background.”

While these ambience videos go back years, to clips like the roaring Yule log that crackles in silence or in harmony with Christmas music, they are beginning to take on many new forms. It’s not just office workers seeking a respite from the water cooler chatter with a coffee shop vibe, or college students drowning out their roommates playing video games with lofi beats. Recently, clips of people walking on treadmills at home went viral on TikTok and Instagram, not for the exercise routines, but for what they were watching: YouTube videos that simulate a stroll around locations in the Harry Potter universe, like Hogwarts and Hogsmeade. The people who posted them said the background animations were the incentive that motivated them to get active.

But is this much background stimulation really necessary to complete a mundane task, like walking or filling out a spreadsheet? Of course not, but it does appear to be an extension of another social media phenomenon.

“We can think of [these accounts] like any other content creator or any other account where you’re forming a kind of parasocial relationship to it, and it’s serving some type of need that you have,” Taylor says. Case in point: There’s a Lofi Girl Reddit page specifically for her channel and variations of it, with over 44,000 members.

For one, our perception of community gathering spaces like coffee shops or parks — common settings for ambiance videos — shifted during the pandemic. These once easily accessible places were either closed or imbued with a sense of trepidation, which in turn led people to find solace and familiarity through a representation of it online. But why are people still tuning into videos of these places, when these kinds of facilities are generally operating as they were before the pandemic?

Maybe it’s because we became more socially awkward after the pandemic. Toward the end of 2020, The New York Times reported on this social skill epidemic, writing about how people who spend extended periods of time in isolation — prisoners, astronauts, polar explorers — saw their social skills decline, in the same way that our muscles weaken if they’re not used enough.

“But this was four years ago.” True, but the fact is that it’s still impacting us now — the magazine Philadelphia wrote about this phenomenon back in April, citing statistics regarding our socialization abilities: Over half of Americans are having a hard time forming relationships with others. We can’t get away from our screens. We’re hanging out with people less. We’re comfortable having fewer friends. “Third places” — those spots outside home and work where people gather — are disappearing.

Some even consider the internet as a newer kind of third place given how many people spend time and find communities there. With chronically online generations of young adults, it’s an interesting phenomenon that people are plugged-in and active when it comes to social media yet are socially disconnected from in-person relationships and experiences. These factors, in turn, all make for a perfect storm where ambiance videos provide people with solutions for loneliness and anti-socialization without having to actually do anything. It’s something that Taylor says might be impacting Gen Z the most.

“I think [these videos represent] something that is of a different time, especially for Gen Z who don’t really remember life before social media versus Millennials, where we remember hanging out with our friends without everyone being on their phone or everything being about content or social media.”

And while Taylor also cites the pandemic as one reason for the influx of viewers turning to these ambiance videos, she says another factor may be a combination of economics and accessibility.

“On the one hand, being in these spaces [in real life] is not necessarily free and people may not have the time to do so given their work, childcare or school schedule.” she says. “Additionally, the specific ‘aesthetic’ or vibe that they seek out may not be accessible in their area, making it a form of escapism beyond their context or environment.”

Prices at places like coffee shops, bars and restaurants have all been on the rise, and given today’s economic climate, it’s not a complete shock to say people — and not just young adults — are having a hard time keeping up. These videos are, in a way, another form of experiencing these third places without actually having to spend the money and go in person.

But what people gain in escapism — or focus, or motivation — they lose in real-life human experiences. We work online, we talk to people through text messages and emails, we scroll through social media, we watch shows and listen to music on internet-connected apps. So it only makes sense that, in seeking to escape to an environment perfectly tailored to our desires, the internet has offered up its own solution — one that doesn’t require logging off.