Picture this, you’re in your room, homework was especially brutal today, five of your teachers are expecting projects due by the end of the week! You’re exhausted, but you need to focus. Working in complete silence would be a total bore, so you resort to YouTube for any kind of mental stimulation.

You want something calm and peaceful, so you search for lo fi music. A few of the playlists look interesting, but then you see a livestream from a channel named Lofi Girl. The stream itself is wonderful, you could feel the stress oozing away and everything just feels right with the world. 

Who is this Youtuber? You may be asking that to yourself, so you click on the channel and she has loads of other videos just like the livestream. You’re looking around at all the videos and see that the more popular videos have a few million each. What?! Her most popular one has 92 MILLION views?? That’s insane!

Lofi Girl has been on Youtube since approximately late 2017 to early 2018. Before she claimed her title of Lofi Girl, she was previously known as ChilledCow. Created by a man named Dimitri (last name unknown), the channel’s debut earned an explosion of views, collecting over a million in six months from his stream. The channel’s longest stream lasted two years, earning a record for one of the longest videos on YouTube.

These glory days didn’t last forever. On July 10th 2022, YouTube ended the stream due to a Malaysian record label’s copyright strike. The community that this channel had formed came together and pressured YouTube to bring back Lofi Girl. YouTube had deemed the copyright claims as “abusive”, and Lofi Girl returned.

The Malaysian record label, FMC Music, responded to the backlash by claiming they were hacked, but not much else has been done about their part in the drama. 

YouTube had previously taken down the channel in February of 2020 for violating their Terms of Service, but reinstated it after a claim of a “mistake on their side”. Despite all this hassle, the channel has been thriving and expanding past their channel. With 25k monthly listeners on Spotify, and the development of limited edition merch, the Lofi Girl team is relying less and less on their YouTube channel and looking for other ways to earn revenue. 

There is no way to tell what might happen to Lofi Girl on other music platforms or social media apps, but hopefully there is a bright future ahead of them.