Lounge music is a retrospective description of music popular in the 1950s and 1960s encompassing the exotica, easy listening, and space age pop genres.
It is a type of mood music meant to evoke in the listeners the feeling of being in a place — a jungle, an island paradise, outer space, etc. — other than where they are listening to it.
The range of lounge music encompasses beautiful music-influenced instrumentals, modern electronica (with chillout, Nu-jazz and downtempo influences), whilst remaining thematically focused on its retro-space-age cultural elements.
The earliest type lounge music appeared during the 1920s and 1930s, and was known as Light music. Contemporaneously, the term lounge music also denotes the types of music played in hotels (the lounge, the bar), casinos, and piano bars.
