Most lofi sits between 70 and 90 beats per minute. When we measured 149 of our own tracks, 108 of them fell in that range, and the middle value was about 81 BPM. Sleep-oriented lofi goes slower, into the 50s and 60s; chillhop runs a little faster, into the 90s. If a tempo app tells you a lofi track is 160 BPM, it's almost certainly counting double.
What we measured
We ran an automatic beat tracker over every track on the site. Here's how the tempos fell:
| Tempo | Tracks |
|---|---|
| Under 50 BPM | 2 |
| 50 to 59 | 9 |
| 60 to 69 | 12 |
| 70 to 79 | 24 |
| 80 to 89 | 84 |
| 90 to 99 | 12 |
| 100 and up | 6 |
The big cluster between 80 and 89 is partly our taste and partly Suno's: as you'll see below, Suno tends to come out a little faster than asked.
The double-time trap
Lofi drums are often "half-time": the snare lands on beat 3 instead of 2 and 4, and the hi-hats move twice as fast as the pulse you'd nod to. Beat trackers, and a lot of tempo apps, lock onto the hi-hats and report double the tempo you feel.
Our tracker did exactly that on 61 of the 149 tracks, reporting between 115 and 200 BPM for music that obviously isn't. We halved those readings, which gets one album wrong (below) but the rest right. One nice check: the album where we'd asked Suno for 130 to 140 BPM read as 136 before halving, so that one really is fast, just with a slow feel.
If you're setting a tempo in a DAW or reading one off an app, ask: where would you tap your foot? That's the real tempo.
Did Suno play at the tempo we asked for?
Most of our style prompts named a tempo. Comparing what we asked for with what we got:
| Album | Asked for | Measured (median) |
|---|---|---|
| Past Whispers | 70 BPM | 81 |
| Rainlit Jazz Reverie | 70 to 80 | 81 |
| Rainy Groove Reverie | 70 to 85 | 83 |
| Whispering Cosmos | 45 to 65 | 65 |
| Luminous Breeze | 45 to 65 | 59 |
| Campfire Blues | 50 to 65 | 60 |
| Driftwood Reverie | 65 to 75 | 74 |
| Midnight Raga Whispers | 70 to 85 | 89 |
Suno usually lands in or near the range, and when it misses, it tends to run a little fast. Asking for "70 BPM" got us around 80. If you want a truly slow track, ask for slower than you want. The full prompts are here.
Which tempo for what
- Sleep: 50 to 70 BPM. Slow enough that the pulse almost disappears. See the sleep room.
- Studying and reading: 70 to 85 BPM. Steady and unhurried. See lofi for studying.
- Work and coding: 75 to 90 BPM. A little more forward motion. See lofi for coding.
- Chillhop and cooking: 85 to 95 BPM. Enough bounce to move to. Lofi vs chillhop vs jazzhop explains the difference.
Setting tempo when you make lofi
- In a DAW: start at 75 to 85. Add swing so the beat feels slower than the number.
- In an AI prompt: give a number or a narrow range ("72 BPM", "70-75 BPM"), and aim a bit lower than your target.
- For a loop under a video: at 80 BPM, one bar of four beats is 3 seconds, which makes cutting to time easy. Cutting lofi for Shorts and Reels.
Written by Suman Kumar with AI help and checked before publishing. Tempos measured with an automatic beat tracker on 149 of our tracks, the ones on this site at the time; the data and method are in our content folder.