Lo-fi music conquered YouTube. Now it’s got a rising religious niche.

“I needed some sweet baptized beats,” one commenter wrote. “If anyone could say a prayer for the health of my children, I would appreciate it,” wrote another. “I will say a quick prayer for you both, Maggie and Neza,” replied someone called BF. “God bless you, everyone listening!”

Since it first streamed a year ago, a YouTube video of a cartoon man reading a Bible and smoking a cigar on his porch to the sound of piano-dusted beats has been viewed 1.5M times. Its popularity means YouTube’s algorithm easily surfaces it whenever somebody searches for “lo-fi,” or low-fidelity music, the DIY genre notable for its analogue warmth and looped beats — and, in this video’s unusual case, snippets of Gregorian chant. 

According to Gitnux, lo-fi has seen about a 50% increase in searches over the past year, with lo-fi hip-hop increasing 200% in streams. The most prominent lo-fi account, Lofi Girl, has over 14M followers, and new accounts are constantly popping up. Like classical music, lo-fi can calm the listener and provide a soothing backdrop for studying or relaxing. But plaintive Latin hymns aren’t historically mixed with lo-fi beats, and that’s exactly why the genre has made the brains behind @catholiclofi thousands of dollars. 

The “catholic lofi” channel, which has 120K subscribers, is run by Matt Fradd, a Catholic author and podcaster behind Pints with Aquinas, which features discussions about Catholicism. Fradd has amassed over 11M views on just eight videos on @catholiclofi. Generally, the music is sonically more lo-fi than laudate, but listen long enough and you’ll hear a male choir percolate through the beats. The 10-hour deep-sleep Gregorian-chant fest quickly kyrie-eleisons you into prayerful slumber against the sound of rainfall and light static. As a culturally Catholic former choirgirl, I concede that I would listen to unadulterated Catholic chants to relax, but combining the holy music with lo-fi not only double-doses the chill, but also makes it a lot more accessible. Fradd does not name his co-conspirators, nor where the sounds originated, though he does thank a self-described “Catholic cartoonist,” Joshua Masterson, who provides the animations that accompany each video. The protagonists they have invented include “rosary girl” and “sleepy dad.” This is cozy Catholicism. 

Which is, interestingly, not how I would describe Matt Fradd, who’s known for his position on topics around sexual morality, where he’s made content about “freeing” folks from pornography and about rejecting LGBT Pride Month, describing the community as “loved” but “intrinsically evil.” None of that finds its way to @catholiclofi where, as he says in a video, “we didn’t have to spiral into ecclesial and national politics”; in fact, you won’t find his name anywhere on the channel except for where he asks for subscriptions on his Locals page, a subscription platform owned by Rumble (both share a reputation for housing “deplatformed’ conservatives). 

Fradd was influenced by the power of Lofi Girl, a decidedly apolitical figure created in 2018 by a label now known as Chillhop Music. Lofi Girl is a young anime woman with dark-brown hair who sits writing to an infinitely looped lo-fi hip-hop livestream. 39K people can be listening to her live at any given time; the gargantuan growth of the channel above all other similar ones has earned her a seemingly permanent place in YouTube’s recommendations. RocketReach estimates that Chillhop Music has an annual revenue of $15M from streams and playlists as well as merch (you can buy Lofi Girl’s plaid for $60).

Fradd said in one of his videos that he was driven to create @catholiclofi to build community and evangelize. Surely financial gain can’t be a drawback. When the channel was demonetized for not creating original-enough content, he revealed it was earning him “several hundreds of bucks” a month at just 23K subscribers. “Statistics are insanely inflated compared to other musical genres,” said Aaron Richardson, the producer behind lo-fi channel “lazyboyloops.” “Getting 100 to 150 streams for a band is mind-blowing. But if you can secure Spotify editorial in lo-fi, in decent playlists you can hit 80K to 100K listeners in a month.” 

Many producers can enjoy revenue from both YouTube’s advertising revenue and YouTube music. On Spotify, they can win big on streams or curate hit playlists that musicians have to pay to submit to. Labels like Chillhop Music on-board producers with whom they then split revenue. The profit-sharing seems worth it; artists who had only a few thousand streams have seen that number rise to 500K with platforming. 

But a half million listens can mean very little on the internet. “Lo-fi is entirely made up of passive listening,” Richardson said. “Sleepy lo-fi in itself is booming — you’re almost guaranteed that someone will put your playlist on for hours just to have some background noise. If you’re wanting to make a career out of it in terms of a fanbase, being involved in lo-fi really isn’t it.” The space is now overcrowded with people who think lo-fi can become passive income. Some channels churn out hundreds of videos a day, regurgitating the same loops in alternative orders and even duplicating themselves across the platform. 

“It broke the scene for those really trying, about three to four years ago,” said Sam Cuckow, who’s been running lo-fi channel “Homework Radio” for seven years. “Channels like my own are fighting against ‘bot farm’ channels for views.” 

But beyond the bots, culture blooms. Catholic lo-fi isn’t the only subgenre to emerge in the wake of Lofi Girl’s success. There are 1.6M views for “Skyrim but it’s lofi beats,” and variations of that for “Lord of the Rings,” “Star Wars,” “Ancient Rome,” and “Islam.” Moostakeem Zahan Ahammed, a 19-year-old music producer in Bangladesh, spent seven months using a mix of tools to create “Nasheed For Studying, Sleeping and Relaxing with lofi theme,” which has racked up over a million views since it was published last year. “I created this video for the people who are broken and who never focus on study, they cannot find peace in music… when they listen to this, they get some peace. And it is halal,” he told me. He has faced copyright issues several times. Lo-fi production has almost always sampled existing music, but now it’s also up against content-identification systems within platforms, which can also erroneously judge royalty-free music as copyrighted. Ahammed asks users to donate to his Paypal to help him to continue his “video-making life,” but so far no one has. 

In the face of big-tech moderators, perhaps a higher power can be useful to creators. Two weeks ago, Fradd announced that “the prayers worked.” @catholiclofi has been remonetized and its following has grown by 500%. “I do believe, right this second, he may be earning more than me,” Cuckow said. “We’re at the mercy of the YouTube algorithm.” From his mouth to God’s ears.

Sophia Smith Galer is an award-winning journalist, author, and broadcaster.