What does AI training sound like? We asked our contributors—and made a playlist

What does it sound like when hundreds of thousands of people train AI?

Turns out, it sounds like everything.

Classical piano bleeding into Kendrick Lamar. Lo-fi beats next to Bollywood soundtracks. Jazz standards rubbing shoulders with video game OSTs. Songs in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Arabic—and that's just the first hour.

We didn't expect this when we asked a simple question in our Inside Outlier newsletter: What are you listening to while you contribute?

But we got 500+ song submissions from contributors all over the world. Engineers, linguists, medical professionals, creative writers, mathematicians—every domain you can imagine. And they all had something to say about what keeps them focused.

So we made a playlist

Because why not? When your community spans continents and disciplines, when the person reviewing code in São Paulo might be listening to the same album as the linguist annotating text in Seoul, you capture that.

The Outlier Contributors Playlist is wildly eclectic in the best way. It's proof that focus music is deeply personal—and that there's no single soundtrack to doing meaningful task completion.

Some contributors sent us their go-to concentration albums. Others sent guilty pleasures. A few sent songs that reminded them why they love what they do here. One person submitted an entire opera. Another sent a single lo-fi track they've been looping for three years straight.

What we learned

This project started as a fun question, but it became something bigger: a snapshot of a truly global community.

You can hear it in the transitions. A Portuguese fado track flows into a Korean indie ballad. A Chopin nocturne gives way to a Nigerian Afrobeats hit. The playlist doesn't try to smooth over those edges—it celebrates them.

It also reminded us that contributors want to connect. Not just with projects, but with each other. You're part of something larger than any single task or domain. You're part of a community that stretches across time zones, languages, and musical tastes—but shares a common thread of curiosity and focus.

Give it a listen

Whether you're deep in a task right now or just curious what your fellow contributors are vibing to, the playlist is live on Spotify.

Fair warning: it's long. Really long. But that's the point. Scroll through and you'll find something that speaks to you—or discover something completely new.

And if you're not part of the Outlier Community yet? This is what it sounds like here. Diverse, curious, a little chaotic, and always interesting. Come contribute with us.