What BPM should yoga music be?

It depends on the phase. In a 60-minute power vinyasa class, centering sits around 60–75 BPM, sun salutations climb from roughly 90 to 120 BPM, the peak reaches 115–128 BPM, then cooldown drops back to 70–90 and savasana to 50–65 BPM or silence. Yin and restorative stay low and flat, 40–70 BPM, often with no perceptible beat. BPM is a guideline, not a rule: read the feel of the track, not just the number.

How do you build a yoga playlist for a class?

Sequence it in arc order to match the class's energy curve, then turn shuffle off. Overshoot the length (75–80 minutes for a 60-minute class) so you never run out, front-load extra ambient and savasana tracks, pre-scrub your peak track so the drop lands on the peak pose, kill autoplay and download for offline, and normalize volume. The sustainable way to do this every week is to build a library of phase-tagged tracks and assemble from buckets rather than starting from a blank page. For an instant starting point, CueCraft's free Yoga Mixtape generator at /playlist deals a phase-sequenced 60-minute set in one tap.

What music works best for savasana?

Return to where you started: ambient drone, soft pads, singing bowls, or silence. Use one long track with no transitions, long enough to cover the whole rest, and avoid anything with lyrics, dynamics, or an ending that dumps the room into silence or an autoplay ad mid-savasana.

Scoring the room: building a yoga playlist by class arc phase

A good class has a shape: it starts quiet, builds heat, crests, and lets you down soft. Music either supports that shape or fights it. The fix is to think like a film composer scoring a sixty-minute arc, matching the music to what the body is doing in each phase.

Power vinyasa, phase by phase: Centering (~60–75 BPM, ambient, no beat); Warmup (~70–90 BPM, a heartbeat appears); Sun A (~90–110 BPM, hypnotic groove); Sun B (~105–120 BPM, the driving engine room); Standing series (~100–118 BPM, grounded stamina music); Peak (~115–128 BPM, the one moment music can lead, with the drop timed to the pose); Cooldown (~70–90 BPM, the exhale); and Savasana (~50–65 BPM or silence, back to ambient).

There is also a louder opposite to the quiet come-down: the loud cooldown. Some teachers quiet the mind by filling it rather than emptying it, using a saturating wall of sustained, non-rhythmic sound (a soundbath of bowls, gongs, and drones) or a big emotional anthem held through savasana. The active ingredient is transient density, not decibels: loud and sustained soothes, loud and rhythmic activates. The soundbath fills the room; the anthem steers it.

Yin and restorative invert the arc: it is low and flat with no peak, 40–70 BPM and often no beat, and the music's job is to hold space rather than move the body. To run a playlist live, sequence in arc order with shuffle off, overshoot the length, pre-scrub the peak track, steer with the skip button on transitions, and protect the two seams that matter most: the peak landing and the drop into cooldown. The efficient long-term method is a phase-tagged library you reassemble each week.

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