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, et cetera — 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), while 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.

Chill out music derives from a slang injunction to "relax" and is an umbrella term for several styles of electronic music characterized by their mellow style and mid-tempo beats. Chill out music emerged in the early and mid-1990s in "chill rooms" at dance clubs, where relaxing music was played to allow dancers a chance to "chill out" from the more emphatic and fast-tempo music played on the main dance floor. See Wikipedia for additional info on lounge and chill out music.