‘Sleep-inducing’ is rarely a compliment, but Meditation app Calm hopes to have listeners nodding off with its hour-long remixes of hits by the likes of Ariana Grande and Katy Perry
It is 11.30pm on a Thursday and I have taken to my bed with my headphones on and an hour-long “sleep remix” of Post Malone’s multi-platinum 2019 hit Circles for company. As you’ve presumably guessed, the idea is that the remix is supposed to help me drift off to sleep: the vastly successful meditation app Calm has just launched a Sleep Remix Series of tracks by big pop artists – Post Malone, Ariana Grande, Shawn Mendes and Katy Perry among them – as the latest addition to their huge library of sounds designed to send users off for the night.
If the author of Beerbongs & Bentleys – a man who has barbed wire tattooed across his forehead, and indeed the words “always tired” inked beneath his eyes – doesn’t seem the most obvious candidate for a job as a soothing bedtime accompanist, the arrival of Calm’s Sleep Remix Series isn’t entirely unexpected. For one thing, not since the chillout compilation boom of the early 2000s – when record stores shelves were groaning under the weight of collections featuring Röyksopp, Zero 7, Kinobe, Blue States, tracks from Moby’s album Play and a variety of other purveyors of gentle advert-soundtrack-friendly electronica – has music that wafts unobtrusively in the background been such a big deal.
