Apple Music's New “Chill” Station Drops The Balm On Your Stressed-Out Brain

In 2024, the Global Wellness Institute reported that the “wellness” economy in the United States has become worth a staggering $1.8 trillion economy. As of 2022, the GDP of the entire world was estimated to be about $100 trillion. The current market valuation of mental health alone is $87 billion. I’m no mathematician, but that means that in 2024 the United States spent 1/100th of the entire world’s goods and services output on feeling good. The irony, so clear it hits like a slap in the face, is that we live in a country in which everyone is deeply unwell. People are dying younger, and when they do, it seems as if they’re angrier, poorer, and more disillusioned than at any point in modern history. The American dream is dead for most swaths of the population, swallowed up by too big-to-fail corporations and CEOs who name their first born child Stock Buyback. So, when Apple Music announced the launch of their very own wellness radio channel, Chill, on Tuesday December 10, I approached it with a healthy amount of skepticism.

Was this a money grab, a hope of latching onto a rapidly rising sector of the economy? Or, does this come from a genuine desire to exist as an antidote to the commodification and playlistification of our entire society, let alone music consumption? The answer exists somewhere in the middle, I suspect—but after two days of immersing myself in Apple’s Chill station, I can’t help but feel like it's a shelter from an increasingly violent storm.

Chill is hosted by singer and radio host Sabi, who, per Apple, “guides you through a full day of programming by introducing each new set of songs—meant to help you relax, unwind and unplug.” Sabi is also in charge of the station’s Mindful Moments, which are “brief breaks in programming that serve as reminders to be present and Chill.” Sabi is the day-to-day guide for the program, but Apple also enlisted Zane Lowe, Brian Eno, and Stephan Moccio to handle their own shows.

On Sundays, Lowe hosts Zane Needs to Chill. On Friday, the king of ambient music, Brian Eno, will host AMBER Radio. Moccio’s Feel More Radio will run every Saturday. Granted, I’ve only been listening to the station for a few days (first episodes of these specialized shows aired on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of this week for the Chill launch), but the reason why Chill has been a success — or, at the very least, has made me less aggro about the absolutely fucked state of everything — is because they entrusted the project with artists and entertainers that are not only good at their job but genuinely interested in music being a balm, a safe-haven from *gestures wildly at nothing in particular* all the stuff out there.

Art consumption is endless and we’re desperately unequipped to learn, study, and immerse ourselves in all the things we wish to experience. This is what being born and dying is all about. The list grows longer, never shorter. During my Zoom call with Brian Eno, he explained how stark this notion felt as a 76-year-old. We were discussing the things he does to “chill,” which felt like a very silly thing to be asking one of the great musical geniuses this world has ever seen. Alas, I should have expected such a hero to answer as thoughtfully as he did, but still, I was taken aback by the honesty of his revelation. “I have a very big library, and I recently had the stunning realization that at my age I will not reread many of the books that I had always hoped to reread. For instance, one of the great books I've been looking forward to rereading for years is Richard Massey's biography of Peter the Great. It's one of the great books in my opinion, but it's a very long book and I've got such a heap of books to read,” he explained with some resignation. “I should probably never get to that one again. That's sort of sad, realizing there are old friends you are not ever going to see again.”

Hearing this while staring at an ever-growing pile of 2025 album promos gave me some perspective. Apple Music Radio’s Chill station as such is a way of giving your mind a break, of allowing some legendary curators, musicians, and artistic theorists to guide you towards peace. “Music is a way of achieving silence. It's a way of giving your mind enough to do for it not to want to engage with the kinds of things it's normally full of,” Eno explains. “The biggest issue for most people at the moment is that there's a huge competition for our attention. That's what practically everything on the internet has become — a competition for your attention, because your attention is valuable.” Put it another way: Chill is not in the game of commodifying your attention for anything outside a temporary salve. In this context, the station did allow me to relax — regardless of what was playing on the station.

I asked Jonathan Meiburg, whose band Loma is featured on Eno’s station, about how they incorporate “chill” or “wellness” into his work, and his answer helped illuminate the ever-shifting definition that this station hopes to embody. Eno, he points out, "once said that sounds coming through the windows of his studio often fit the music he was making, almost like the world was playing along—and we thought, well, let's take that to heart. You can hear dogs, frogs, cicadas, the rustling leaves of a crabapple tree, and the waves on Chesil Beach in our songs. They're some of our favorite moments.”

Haux, another singer-songwriter whose music appears on Zane Lowe’s station, added his thoughts, too. “In the age of art on-demand I don't mind being a black sheep. I work slowly because I live slowly. I take my time making records because I've learned that I tend to see more of life this way,” he explains. “I climb the sugar maples in spring and cut firewood in the fall. I'm not running around my life blindfolded anymore like I did in Los Angeles. I'm finding a new rhythm here on sugar mountain—a woodsy kind of wellness.” You might not be able to transport yourself to sugar mountain, but you might be able to feel what Haux feels for four minutes when his song rolls through your speakers.

That, above all, is what Zane Lowe hopes to achieve with the show he’s created to paradoxically de-stress his work life. The creation of Zane Needs to Chill has been an exercise in bringing his own wellness practices to a wider audience. “It's all about energy. What are we doing with our energy? We have a finite amount of it,” he says over Zoom with his signature blend of philosophical mindedness and hyper energy. “We think we have unlimited space in our brain. We think we have unlimited energy to spend. We think we have unlimited life to live at a certain point of our life and we just don't."

Zane has recalibrated what fuels him, the things that bring him joy. The hustle remains, but it's cut with the occasional moment of doing nothing; of course, his idea of doing nothing is creating a musical world in which listeners can do nothing. “I love to give back to music. This is really the ultimate give-back to me, this Chill station, because it's an environment where when you turn it on, you're probably searching for a reason to turn parts of you off and replace it with something that is a more replenishing experience. “We should encourage ourselves and each other to afford ourselves some space to be able to replenish as well,” he adds.

Without getting too saccharine, this is the experience I took away from a few days with Chill. Perhaps my experience is a bit different, as someone whose job involves being inundated with new music on a daily basis, but the reprieve provided by Chill seems the exact outcome its creators were hoping for. It feels less algorithmic than playlists, mostly because the station doesn’t give a shit whether you like what’s playing or not. There’s no request for feedback, no need for a thumbs up or thumbs down after each song. It simply exists to calm you down, and calm me down it did indeed.

Despite this, though, the music isn’t always explicitly “chill” or meant for disengagement. Will Archer, who makes music under the name Wilma Archer and is another favorite artist of Eno, spoke to this. “As someone who also makes mostly instrumental music, essentially unconcerned with verbal storytelling, the theme I recognize in Eno solo albums, collabs, and productions is the priority of emotion over virtuosity. I always found that instrumental music is a battle to hold an audience's attention without a human voice to anchor your focus and explain the song with language. There is no room for clutter, every single element counts for more,” he explains. “The speed at which Eno’s music grabs you has always confused and astounded me, in its apparent sparsity.”

The channel, in this sense, doesn’t encourage passivity as much as it does alternative modes of listening. This was something Zane Lowe prioritized, too. “Chill shouldn't just be this thing that cruises along at an easy altitude. I want my station to mirror life, which has got real highs and real lows. You should be able to put on a Big Red Machine song and feel like you can climb a mountain, even though that music isn’t in a quote-unquote chill space.”

When I asked Zane Lowe why he decided to do more work in order to be more chill about doing his work, he gave an illuminating answer. “The music business is data, streams, records, and product.That's the core business and I'm here for it,” Lowe explains. “But in its true core is a frequency that, when it enters you, your skin changes and everything around you vibrates, altering your life in that very moment.” Eno also tried to explain the function of his station, relating it to his forthcoming book What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory. “What we’re doing with art is refining our sense of the kind of world that we would like to be in and the kind of worlds we would like to avoid.” Apple Music Radio’s Chill station is one such world I don’t mind living in. Not one bit.