Filz

Easy listening/lounge singers have a lengthy history stretching back to the decades of the early twentieth century. Easy listening music featured popular vocalists. The somewhat derisive term lounge lizard was coined then, and less well known lounge singers have often been ridiculed as dinosaurs of past eras and parodied for their smarmy delivery of standards. In any event, these lounge singers, perhaps performing in a hotel or cocktail bar, are usually accompanied by one or two other musicians, and they favor cover songs composed by others, especially pop standards, many deriving from the days of Tin Pan Alley. Many well known performers got their start as lounge singers and musicians. Not all lounge singers, however, sing lounge music.

Sometimes, the easy listening subgenre lounge is considered to belong to the chill-out collection as well. Chill-out, as a musical genre or description, is synonymous with the more recently popularized terms smooth electronica, and it is a loose genre of music blurring into several other very distinct styles of electronic and lo-fi music.