Word.ws English Dictionary

functional music

functional music noun: music designed to influence mood, behavior, or cognitive state.

Noun

functional music (uncountable)

  1. Music designed to influence mood, behavior, or cognitive state.
    • By championing the lean-back listener, Spotify helped popularize a resurgence of interest in “functional music”, the industry's current preferred way to describe music for sleeping, studying, chilling, focusing, etcetera. Today, functional music is a defining phenomenon of the streaming era...2025, Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, 1st edition, New York: Atria Books, →ISBN

Questions about functional music

What does functional music mean?
Functional music means music designed to influence mood, behavior, or cognitive state.
What part of speech is functional music?
Functional music is a noun.

Words near functional music in the dictionary

  1. functional loads
  2. functional magnetic resonance imaging
  3. functional magnetic-resonance imaging
  4. functional medicine
  5. functional MR imaging
  6. functional music
  7. functional necrophilia
  8. functional neurological disorder
  9. functional neurological symptom disorder
  10. functional programming
  11. functional psychology

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: functional music (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “functional music.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/functional_music. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.