The short version
- Universal Music Group and Apple Music launched “Pop Therapy,” 151 chart tracks with monaural beats embedded, on October 8.
- The supporting trial is company-authored, one 30-minute session, 308 people, and found the music-plus-beats worked while beats alone did not.
- The 91.9% “felt calmer” figure is a 140-person satisfaction survey, not a clinical result.
Universal Music Group and Apple Music released “Pop Therapy” on October 8, two days ahead of World Mental Health Day: 151 tracks, more than 8 hours, from Olivia Dean, Sam Smith, Shawn Mendes, Niall Horan, Jon Batiste, Chad Lawson and others, each with a monaural beat mixed underneath. The catalog sits under “Sound Therapy” on Apple Music and in a free Sollos iOS app in the UK and US, with the first month free for linked Apple Music accounts. There are three beat settings: gamma for focus, theta for relaxation, delta for sleep. Sollos is UMG’s audio-wellness unit, and Digital Music News reports more than 250 UMG artists have signed on.
The evidence behind it is a company-authored trial in Frontiers in Psychology (2025; Venkatesan, Demetriou, Koops, Bowling): 308 people, one 30-minute session, non-clinical. Music with embedded beats reduced anxiety (d = −0.58) and lifted mood (d = 0.48) against a pure-tone control. Beats alone did not reduce anxiety. The 91.9% who “felt calmer” come from a separate 140-person UK user survey, which measures satisfaction, not symptoms.
Read plainly, the trial says the music did the work and the beats did not add a measurable anxiolytic effect on their own.
