I was alive during the time when Roblox had just released one of its most memorable updates of all time. They would automatically replace copyrighted music with 60s/70s easy listening and jazz music from the APM music library. It was surreal, because this music would play at the worst possible time in games, like during natural disasters or during intense parties.
I played these songs intentionally, and it was my first ever contact with easy listening music from the 70s. I felt something special for this sort of music that I listened to it so many times that I may be the Roblox APM copyright replacement music’s biggest fan.
Fasten your seatbelts, because this article is going to be the hell of a ride into old Roblox archaeology, old footage, a Roblox atmosphere that no longer exists and a burning autistic attachment to music nobody else cared about. Enjoy!
The Roblox – APM partnership changed everything
In May 2018, precisely June 18th 2018, Roblox made a partnership with APM Music to have production music (background music for videos, games, digital content) replace all the copyrighted songs users would upload and play on their platform.
This happened because people used popular music without a license or rights to use it a lot, and this was fucking with Roblox’s legal stuff and was against their Terms of Use.
This was written inside the official Roblox support article:
If you don’t remove any copyrighted music, and it is flagged by our Moderation team, we will automatically replace the music with Licensed Music.
Roblox, in the same article, claimed that the license agreement they signed with APM Music would supposedly give users access to “hundreds of thousands of tracks” to replace their copyrighted audios with.
Of course, though, advanced algorithms weren’t a thing for when a song or audio was being replaced to replace it with a fitting replacement song, and the replacement was kind of lazy. This resulted in a few specific songs replacing every copyrighted song that existed on the face of Roblox.
This aged really well.
Accidental Musical Absurdity
Picture badly modelled sharks falling from the sky in a blocky city, with a really low quality tornado visual effect in the middle, all while 80s easy listening smooth jazz plays in the background.
You don’t have to picture it, take a look:
Or,
Imagine a person fighting titans and jumping off rooftops in a game with really bad titan 3D models while an orchestral arrangement with lush strings and flutes plays easy listening music.
You don’t have to imagine:
This footage belongs to Kevin Simpson on YouTube, by the way. Without him having left these videos from 2018 still uploaded and active, we wouldn’t have gotten this beautiful footage. Kudos, Kevin!
Every person who played Roblox after that update in 2018-2019 remembers this music playing during the most inappropriate of moments, such as during natural disasters, scary entities chasing you, kaiju attacks, dramatic scenes, parties, or even replacing the sounds of vehicles.
Many people were irritated by the intended musical mood being completely warped into contradictive madness from the easy listening music that would automatically play when the moderation system found copyrighted songs playing.
Serious, sad, scary moments all suddenly having the same sonic emotion as a 70s airport lounge or hotel lobby.
Bossa nova and smooth jazz playing while everyone was dying.
Buildings exploding, carnage and disaster happening with serene elevator music being heard.
It was the sound of disappointment of kids who wanted to play Skrillex on their boombox in a free admin game, of game developers who didn’t bother to put licensed music in their game nor tried to change the copyrighted song after it got removed, of absolute rage being soundtracked with the least matching music possible.
An entire generation of children in 2018-2019 was introduced to 1970s library music because of a copyright crisis.
We were introduced to rich, orchestrated, professional easy listening music meant to make liminal environments like malls, stores and waiting rooms feel smoother, calmer and emotionally pleasant without dominating the atmosphere.
We were hearing liminal music that was trying to make unfitting and disastrous moments emotionally pleasant, which immediately and unintentionally created tonal juxtaposition (mismatch) or musical irony.
This is how it became really fucking memorable and, honestly, hilarious to remember.
The 10 Songs Everyone Heard
The songs everyone knew as Roblox APM Music weren’t the “hundreds of thousands of songs” that the licensing agreement promised.
The Roblox APM songs that replaced copyrighted music automatically were only these ten songs, for which I will provide facts:
Pierre Arvay – Roselita
This song is a jazzy library music song with a simple melody and was likely made to be used as background music for television and to set the mood in public places or advertisements. It sounds cheerful and oddly emotionally distant and repetitive.
The album, Pierre Arvay Anthology, despite being released in 2017, was actually part of Arvay’s 50s-70s work. Obviously, the artist died in 1980, so he wasn’t alive when his album was released.
About Pierre Arvay now, he was born in 1924 in Italy but later lived and worked in France, where he made music for television and various other orchestral shit. He was mostly known for his releases in the De Wolfe music catalogue (the origins of library music). He participated in the French Resistance during WWII, too.
My personal thoughts on this song are that it sounds artificial and slightly uncanny and unintentionally silly. There is something oddly comical about it, even if I can’t exactly point to it.
Duncan Lamont – Lazy Sunday
A relaxing, sentimental, soft library music jazz song from 1973 with a wistful sort of vibe. It’s giving a jazzy sense of soft yearning for something in the past, a soft and thoughtful desire for something out of reach. It has a mellow pacing and gentle repetition.
The album where this song can be found is one of the KPM Greensleeves and specifically KPM 1000 Series: The Human Touch. The whole album feels like it was made for domestic soft scenes in television underscore and has the same feeling as gentle, ordinary life.
The KPM library is one of the most important music libraries in the WORLD, and its records were often not sold to the public and were intended for broadcasts and commercials. Songs from this library were sorted by mood and function and were engineered to create specific vibes.
Duncan Lamont, the artist behind Lazy Sunday, was a Scottish jazz musician who wasn’t just a library music legend, but he was also famous for his work on TV soundtracks, like Mr Benn, and British music. He legit worked with Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Peggy Lee, Count Basie and other super famous musicians.
Gerhard Narholz – Town Talk
This one is my personal favorite, I had legit renamed my previous Roblox account into Town_Talk because of how much I liked it.
Town Talk sounds very optimistic but empty, like a comforting analog simulation of a shopping mall. It has zero aggression and an unmistakably bouncy orchestration. It has the warm fakeness of toys, the optimism of an educational television show and the friendliness of old public media.
This one, surprisingly, wasn’t actually made in the 60s, despite the extremely period-authentic cheerful and warm tone, or its album’s name The Happy 60s. The album was released in the 90s – specifically 1997 – and was meant to sound like the fantasy of the 60s. It is idealised 60s easy listening. The album, produced for Sonoton Records, features music from 1965 and 1976 that was remastered in 1997.
Gerhard Narholz, the person who made this song, was born in Austria in 1937, and he was a composer, but also the founder of Sonoton music, one of the most fucking big music libraries in Europe. He was HUGE in the music production industry and the kind that made easy listening music.
This is perhaps the most listened to song from the Roblox APM music collection and the most memorable. If I were to represent the whole Roblox APM music list with one song, I’d have definitely chosen this one.
Kenny Salmon – Smooth Nylons
Named after the nylon string guitar that was involved in its production, Smooth Nylons is a soft, 60s-70s non-threatening jazz song with synth pads and a texture meant to fit in soft lounge areas, hotel lobbies or airports to calm people down.
The album in which this song can be most easily found, Groovy Baby Kitsch, is a 2016 album released by Soho Music, and it’s a compilation of songs that evoke a nostalgic feeling towards the 70s. It focuses on the optimistic and stereotypical “flower power” aspect of the 70s.
We can’t pinpoint exactly when this song was made (at least not right now in May 2026, as I am writing this article), but it was most definitely created in the 60s or 70s, as this is when Salmon’s most famous television library music work was made.
Kenny Salmon was an English composer and keyboardist who played piano, organ and MiniMoog and was known for his library music work in some of the biggest music libraries like KPM, DeWolfe, Bruton and Sonoton.
As a random fact for those who are curious, this is a MiniMoog:
It is the first portable analog synth keyboard that was released by Moog Music in 1970. Kenny must have used one of these during his music production! It was made to be more portable and compact compared to the other synth modulars that existed at the time, and it has a legendary sound that shaped pop, rock and other genres of music a lot.
Personally, the vibe that I personally get from this song can be best described with the visual scene of a 70s hotel pool, the relaxed, leisurely mood of it. I think it’s the most relaxing song out of the ten.
Acker Bilk & Norman Candler – Soliraire
Being the most dramatic and intense song out of all in the Roblox APM replacement music collection, Solitaire is a sentimental, melancholic and mellow easy listening song with a very memorable and emotional clarinet melody and soft strings. It feels luxurious but intimate, smooth but lonely.
An interesting comment I found on YouTube under this song described the feeling of it as something that sounds like the ‘Mama, just killed a man’ part of the Queen song Bohemian Rhapsody, but an entire song made out of the feeling, which is accurate, at least to me.
The song shouldn’t be mistaken for Neil Sedaka’s song Solitaire, the one used on Roblox is exclusively the version that Acker Bilk and Norman Candler made.
Acker Bilk was the man who played the iconic clarinet melody in this song, and he was, in fact, a recognisable English clarinet player. He was born in 1929, and in his professional music work he was mostly known in traditional jazz, easy listening and library music for television and radio. He hit #1 on billboards in America for his song Stranger on the Shore in 1962.
Acker Bilk’s real name wasn’t Acker; he was actually called Bernard Stanley Bilk. “Acker” is a nickname with origins from Somerset, where he was born. It means “friend” or “mate” in slang.
Norman Candler is not real. HE IS ACTUALLY GERHARD NARHOLZ, the guy who made TOWN TALK. Yes, it was an alias he used in the 70s-80s when working for Decca Records and Telefunken. It was a persona created to produce high quality string music.
This is such a big crossover guys, clarinet legend Acker Bilk and fucking Gerhard Narholz, who founded Sonoton and made Town Talk, AKA one of the best songs ever made according to my autism.
The most known album this song is in is Really Cheezy from the Sonoton music library. It is a 2000 compilation that has original recordings from the 60s and 70s. It is orchestral lounge music with strings and brass and has a kitchy sort of vibe.
In my opinion, this song is really dramatic and oddly sad compared to every other song from the ones used in Roblox APM copyright replacement. It makes my mind wander to a melancholic sort of scenery. Someone sitting somewhere dim and pondering life type of mood.
Anthony Mawer – Prima Bossa Nova
This is an upbeat and optimistic-sounding bossa nova-inspired easy listening song that imitates cruise ship and commercial music from the 60s-70s. It has an oddly elegant, almost vacation-y emotion that is polished and family-friendly luxurious. Very ideal for travel advertisements and hotels.
Bruton Vaults: Kitsch Lush Strings, the album the song is in, is a 2015 compilation with 60s and 70s style easy listening and bossa nova songs. According to Universal Studios Production Music, the official description of the album is this:
“Bruton Vaults Series: Lush syrupy strings for lounging and loving.”
Anthony Mawer is a British library music composer who was born in 1930, and most of his music was produced from the 50s and after, starting with De Wolfe. He pretty much worked under one of the largest music libraries in the world when he was around 25 years old – this is a special achievement, especially nowadays when you can’t even get a basic wage job, haha.
Despite not being able to tell when Prima Bossa Nova was made, I can make the rough estimate that it was made actually in the 60s/70s and not afterwards, as Mawer died in 1999. The sound of the song is also very era-appropriate to the 60s-70s, so I might use this as a clue.
Dick Walter – Playground of the Stars
This is perhaps one of the most well-known Roblox APM songs of all time. Playground of the Stars is a light orchestral song that has a glamorous, luxurious and kind of carefree or romantic feeling on top of a gentle bossa nova rhythm.
It is not known just for Roblox, it has also made various other appearances in other media as well, like the 2006 action video game Saints Row.
It is perhaps the newest song in the Roblox APM copyright replacement music collection, as it’s part of the 2001 easy listening background music album, Background Music Too by Dick Walter.
Dick Walter is MONUMENTAL for background music. His music has been featured in lots and lots of famous media like SpongeBob SquarePants, Fallout New Vegas, The Two Ronnies, Supernatural (TV show), the Yellow Pages campaign and more. He is dear to me as well because of his other incredible background music.
Dick Walter was born in 1946 in a musical family, and he is still alive. He was even recently interviewed about his life and thoughts on AI. He doesn’t like it and described creative AI as “Potentially, very depressing”. You can read the whole interview in this amazing article on LBB here.
Cool fact: Dick Walter is the creator of one of the most famous comedy sounds of all time, Shock Horror (A), also known as “DUN DUN DUUUUUUUN” in meme culture. It’s a professional suspense cue sound effect from the KPM library album The Editor’s Companion. The more you know.
The beautiful, relaxing glam sound of this song is unmistakable. It really reminds me of luxury hotels, in a way.
Brian Dee & Irving Martin – Easy Mover/Coffee Break
Easy Mover, also known as Coffee Break in another version, is an uptempo jazz-lounge library music song. It is kitschy and catchy.
The Easy Mover version of the song exists on the album 70s Easy FM, a collection of various 70s library music recordings meant to, you know, have the same vibe as the 70s. Despite the album being released in 2011, the recordings are old.
The Coffee Break version, which is basically the less popular one, is part of the Bruton BRG4: Good Times library music album that was released in 1978. It contained soul, funk and jazzy sort of songs for 70s film and television. Vinyls made out of this album are collectible, with early pressings having a textured sleeve and newer ones being glossy.
Brian Dee was a popular British jazz pianist who played harmonium, organ and keyboards and had his musical peak in the 60s. He also worked with Elton John on four fucking albums.
Irving Martin was a creative director and music supervisor who worked in Columbia, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros for film music, and was the founder of the Stockton Daily Record newspaper press.
You can imagine how Easy Mover was a thing now, it was the collaboration child of the jazz pianist legend and the badass music director.
I personally think it sounds a lot like the title Coffee Break, except it’s somewhere inside a 70s cafeteria, this exact sort of vibe.
Friedrich Kruntorad – Dimanten/Diamonds
This is an early 80s orchestral pop ballad, easy listening song with a gentle Latin rhythm. It sounds relaxing, slightly dreamy, careless, but in a laid-back and slightly classy way.
The album this song is in is Sonoton Library’s Music In The Air Vol. 3, a 1981 easy listening music album. It has been mis-taged as being part of Vol. 2 of this album series, but originally it’s in Vol. 3.
The original composer of Diamonds is Friedrich Kruntorad, an Austrian jazz musician, pianist and conductor, but the most famous version of this song has been given credit to the ORF Orchestra (Austria Broadcasting Corporation’s orchestra), conducted by Karel Krautgartner.
Diamonds is certainly my second favorite out of the Roblox APM replacement music songs, and I have associated it a lot with sea-front views, relaxation and the general vibe of relaxing after a long day.
Manfred Minnich – No More
No More is one of the most beloved songs from the Roblox APM Replacement Music collection. It’s a 70s easy listening song with a mesmerising and intense melody compared to the rest of the songs.
The composer who made No More was Manfred Minnich, a German music arranger and trumpet musician. His music has been very underestimated, as he has been on popular 90s cartoons like SpongeBob SquarePants as well. He has been part of many orchestras and was known for his entertainment after the wars.
He and Gerhard Narholz (YES, THE GUY WHO MADE TOWN TALK) shared the name “George Winters” because they both combined heavy brass and lush strings in songs.
The actual original release of the song in an album was on The Manfred Minnich String Orchestra album. However, the popular release is in the album Vintage Pearls: Retro Things with Strings, a 2021 compilation of original old recordings from 1967-1973.
No More also appears on the album Really Cheezy, which is the same album AS THE FUCKING SOLITAIRE SONG THIS IS INSANE???! NO WAY.
It is one of the most loved Roblox soundtracks of all time, and I’ve actually seen people searching for it.
In my personal opinion, I feel like this song sounds a bit tense and dramatic, as the title suggests. Hints of frustration or the feeling of being fed up are present; it is action-oriented and slightly angry, it is truly not calm, but an expression of a whole mental state. This song is pissed, it’s pure 70s fed upness.
It started with fun
These are just weird, boring elevator music songs to everyone else. In 2018, when I was playing Roblox myself, though, it was a revelation. It was a canon event.
It was a clusterfuck of absurdity and contradiction to see the world being destroyed before my eyes with easy listening soft lush string music playing in the background, parties with strong and loud songs being interrupted by a soft and quiet 70s jazz-lounge song, or fucking sharks falling from the sky with relaxing jazz accompanying it as if it’s normal.
At the very start of my experience with Roblox APM copyright replacement music, it made me feel spiritually connected to the contradictions that were happening.
I was, and I still am, a BIG FAN of contradictions and juxtapositions. I can’t help but love it when contrasting things are placed together for irony and absurdity, and hearing relaxing old music accompanied by chaos and violence was clearly my cup of tea.
After some point, I really enjoyed these songs, and I wanted to find them and play them on games where there were boomboxes. I did it a lot on games like The Plaza, Wolves’ Life 2 and other places.
To be honest, at first, I was a bit performative when I first played these songs on purpose by selecting song IDs that were removed for copyright and had the APM music play instead. I was feeling amused by the idea of playing the deleted and replaced music on purpose.
To me, it was really amusing to play supposedly replaced and deleted music instead of normal songs that were trendy at the time. Of course, this probably made me look like a total idiot back then, and people likely assumed I unintentionally played deleted music, but I didn’t really care.
I really, REALLY liked it
The phase of me playing Roblox APM copyright replacement music ironically was very short-lived. It didn’t take me a long time to play this music out of genuine enjoyment.
Something about the 70s easy listening music vibes in these songs was deeply comforting for me to listen to. They were not distracting, they were catchy and soft to the ears. It was absolute autistic comfort fuel.
The relaxing and unintrusive sound of these instrumentals soothed me, so I made it an actual habit to listen to Roblox APM copyright replacement music unironically to relax.
Keeping these songs only on Roblox felt like a limitation, so I downloaded them locally on my first mobile phone when I was in middle school.
I genuinely couldn’t get enough of this music, I was listening to it everywhere, all the time, in any season or during any mood.
I vividly recall a moment from my childhood when I went on a school trip with my brother in middle school, and we went to some kind of outdoor sports centre.
I wasn’t a big fan of sports, so I chose to walk around the park’s facilities. I was blaring Roblox APM music on my phone speakers while my phone was in my pocket.
I was careless, I enjoyed my music and didn’t care about being seen as some guy blasting elevator music while walking calmly. I was enjoying life and good tunes.
Part of my life
In 2019 and after, I set up my Spotify account and, of course, brought my music with me. Without thinking much about it, I created the Spotify playlist Roblox APM Music for my own needs.
I absolutely loved my playlist. I kept listening to it on a nearly daily basis, no matter the occasion.
I orchestrated my own life with these 10 songs.
Because of all this listening, I associated Roblox APM music with many feelings and memories, such as:
- Loneliness while looking at the sunset
- Heartbreak after friend breakups
- Relaxation during vacation after having just swam in the sea and basking in the warm afterglow
- Calm focus while working on projects that mattered to me
- Serenity after a warm shower
- Cosiness during a wakeful but restorative nap after work
- Contentment during a walk while on a trip to a seafront city
- Wistfulness while reflecting on life
- Lonesomeness from lack of physical/real life connections with people
Some people reading this might think that it’s not that deep or that I am joking, but NOPE. I sincerely, for realsies, made Roblox APM music my fucking life soundtrack.
It was all about weaponised musical liminality. When the song fits the mood, it amplifies it. When it doesn’t, the music distances you from the feeling without completely hijacking it, like in Roblox.
This worked for me incredibly well.
In a way, when the relaxing 70s easy listening music fit the mood, it felt like a cushion. When it didn’t, life felt healthily detached, absurd and liminal, giving me the space I needed to process how I felt.
Possibly, I’m the biggest fan
I have been listening to these songs so much that they almost always appear on my Spotify Wrapped, especially since 2020.
I lived with this music unironically.
It got burnt into my existence and identity.
It is part of who I am now, and it possibly explains why I am like this.
According to Spotify:
Since 2019, I have listened to this playlist about 3000 times.
And it’s not even including all the times I played the Roblox APM music everywhere else, like, let’s say, locally downloaded on my phone, on YouTube, on Roblox, or on tape.
As a rough speculation, I most likely listened to these songs approximately 4000-4500 times if we count in all the other forms of media.
Yes, I have actually recorded a cassette with these songs on it, and I’ll talk about it in a second.
A Legacy Left Behind
Obviously, what people know me for when it comes to Roblox APM Music right now (before publishing this article, May 2026) is my Spotify playlist with the iconic songs.
Interestingly enough, my Spotify playlist that had just these 10 songs in it has gotten 388 saves as of now. 388 people have my playlist saved in their libraries. People sure love my playlist with the Roblox APM tape in the icon!
This tape holds a significant purpose for me.
When I first started recording my own tapes, initially with a shitty voice recorder that recorded in mono and had the sound quality similar to what a potato would record if it could, I wanted my first ever custom tape to have Roblox APM music in it.
I gifted this tape to myself on Christmas last year (2025), and it is probably one of the best gifts I have ever given to myself ever, as it is a tangible and holdable trinket that immortalises the music that shaped my life.
Watch the purest form of joy here, where I’m playing the tape for the first time and hearing Town Talk playing from inside magnetised plastic:
It is truly special to own a cassette tape with this music on it. Roblox APM Music has been crystallised inside oxide and a plastic shell, and it exists outside of the internet. It is an artifact.
It feels so different to be able to hold the playlist that changed your brain chemistry in your hand and feed it into a little spinny sound device, instead of merely streaming it digitally. It feels like ownership, as if the playlist now belongs to me and my life in person.
Obviously, all the rights and credit go to the original artists, always. Except now I am able to honor them by keeping their work inside a little plastic rectangle.
It’s not even just any plastic rectangle, it’s a late 70s unpopular Encore brand tape, so it’s very on-brand for the contents of it, which are mainly 70s easy listening songs.
Now take this with you
Personally, I didn’t make this article just to get my 8 year old music obsession out of my head. I want people to take a look at this music again, unironically, for the cultural little treasure it really is.
Library music has been designed to change how a scene or place feels, and a whole era of Roblox players witnessed it with their own eyes. Even if the mood change was unmatching and absurd, it continues to be a phenomenon.
Nuanced, beautifully arranged and performed orchestral songs, made by talented musicians, that were originally meant to accompany 70s public space calm, being presented to unsuspecting children and confused adults playing games with action and bloodshed.
Before this article, the only documentation of this awkward Roblox update existed in fragments around the internet, scattered in social media comments, YouTube shorts and Reddit threads, and was talked about ironically as something that just happened.
I did my part, and I made this article to properly document this absurd detail from the late 2010s Roblox that people are starting to forget about.
I provided footage, sound clips and most importantly, the feeling of it as someone who experienced it, so that hopefully someone who is truly interested in knowing about this experience will get a rounded perspective.
This music changed my life, and I genuinely enjoyed putting this article together and doing my research.
This 4.8K word presentation article wasn’t even made for attention, and in fact, I want it to find people randomly and suddenly, like how the Roblox APM copyright replacement music itself appeared suddenly in my life.
I worked on this article for ten days in a row to complete it, so I’ll call it a night now. It’s 12AM, and I have listened to the Roblox APM music playlist at least 30 times tonight while working on this.
Thanks for reading! If this article made you feel something, don’t hesitate to contact me from my Contact Page. I’m eager to hear your thoughts!