BTS and Billie Eilish among the best music to fall asleep to

After analysing nearly 1,000 songs on Spotify, experts have suggested that listening to familiar, energetic music may be as effective as relaxing sounds for sending people to sleep.

Researchers from Aarhus University analysed more than 200,000 songs from 985 playlists associated with sleep on the music app using Spotify‘s API – a programme that can retrieve and manage data.

They identified six distinct sub-categories of music that people listen to for sleep, three of which had the typical slower and quieter melody, which more often featured acoustic instruments and few lyrical notes.

However, the other characteristics included much faster and louder tracks which had a higher degree of energy such as Dynamite by the Korean boyband BTS.

Lovely, a song by Billie Eilish and Khalid, was also among the tracks that aid relaxation and sleep.

The authors of the study, which was published in the journal Plos One, suggested that these songs could help calm people due to their familiarity.

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They added, however, that more research will be needed to explore this and “identify the various reasons different people choose different music for sleeping”.

The findings also revealed that there is no “one size fits all” when it comes to the music people choose for sleep.

Researchers found that even though music associated with sleep is “softer, slower, instrumental and more often played on acoustic instruments than other music, the music people use for sleep displays a large variation including music characterised by high energy and tempo”.

They added: “The study can both inform the clinical use of music and advance our understanding of how music is used to regulate human behaviour in everyday life.”

BTS broke YouTube records in 2020 with their song Dynamite – the video was viewed more than 100 million times within 24 hours of its release and has now passed more than a billion streams on Spotify.