A girl in headphones writes in a notebook at her desk. Every so often she glances at the window, where her cat sits on the sill and a city sits behind it. The loop lasts a little over a minute, and millions of people have kept it open for hours while they work. It is probably the single most recognizable image in lofi.
Here is how it came about. A note before starting: Lofi Study 24/7 is an independent site with no connection to Lofi Girl, ChilledCow or Studio Ghibli.
ChilledCow and a borrowed clip
The channel that became Lofi Girl was created on YouTube on March 18, 2015, under the name ChilledCow. It was run by a young Frenchman who is usually identified publicly only by his first name, Dimitri. When The New York Times profiled the channel in 2018, he was 23, living on the outskirts of Paris, and asked that his last name not be used.
On February 25, 2017, ChilledCow started a 24/7 live stream of lofi hip hop, pitched as music for relaxing or studying. Its first visual was not original. It was a looping clip of Shizuku Tsukishima, the heroine of Studio Ghibli’s 1995 film Whisper of the Heart, doing her homework at her desk.
That choice did not last. YouTube took the stream down from roughly July to October 2017 because the clip was being used without permission. ChilledCow was not alone: according to The Verge, Chillhop’s stream received a copyright strike in February 2018 for using a GIF from Wolf Children, another anime film. Borrowed anime footage was a common shortcut in the early lofi scene, and takedowns pushed channels toward commissioning their own art. The wider visual story is told in where the lofi look comes from.
The illustrator who drew her
The new character was drawn by Juan Pablo Machado, an illustrator and animator from Cali, Colombia, who had moved to Lyon, France, in 2013 to study at the École Émile-Cohl. ChilledCow’s call for artists reached him through his school. It asked for a student busy revising for her classes, drawn with visuals in the spirit of Hayao Miyazaki.
Machado has said he knew little about lofi hip hop at the time and did not normally draw in a Japanese animation style, so he treated the job as a challenge. Some ideas did not survive. In an early version, the girl leaned back in her chair, looked up and then returned to writing, but it took too long to animate. The window was originally left black to save time.
When the idea came up of showing the passage of time, with the sky changing outside, Machado needed something to put in the window. He chose the slopes of La Croix-Rousse, a hill in Lyon, as a tribute to the city where he studied. Attentive viewers can even spot the bell tower of a local church. The animation began appearing on ChilledCow’s streams in March 2018. The girl was later given a name: Jade.
Shutdowns, a record-long video and a rebrand
In February 2020, YouTube suddenly terminated the channel, then reinstated it in less than a day and apologized, saying the suspension was “a mistake on our side.” The original stream could not continue, so it ended as a single video more than 13,000 hours long with about 218 million views, one of the longest videos ever posted to YouTube.
A month later, the pandemic sent millions of students and workers home. According to The Verge, ChilledCow gained about 340,000 subscribers in March 2020 alone, more than double its gain in January.
On March 18, 2021, the channel’s sixth anniversary, ChilledCow renamed itself Lofi Girl after its mascot. “ChilledCow’s name was chosen many years ago, and is no longer reflective of what the channel is about anymore,” the channel said in a statement reported by The Verge, adding that it “has been and always will be about music, art and positivity only.”
The channel passed 10 million subscribers in February 2022. Five months later came its most serious disruption. On July 10, 2022, YouTube removed its two main streams, “beats to relax/study to” and “beats to chill/sleep to”, after copyright claims filed from the account of a Malaysian record label. Between them the streams had nearly 800 million views and around 21,000 hours of continuous playtime. YouTube later called the claims “abusive” and terminated the account that filed them, and a spokesperson for the label said its account had been taken over by hackers. Lofi Girl was back on July 12. Its statement afterwards, quoted by the BBC, focused on the process: “the sad part is that there was no way to appeal beforehand.”
More than one stream
Over time Lofi Girl turned into a small media brand. Its music is released through its own label or used with the artists’ permission. In April 2023 it launched a synthwave stream with a new character, nicknamed Synthwave Boy, and later that year it released its first narrative music video, Snowman, which shows Jade walking through Lyon. It has also run collaborations with companies ranging from Lego to Chess.com, and celebrated its tenth anniversary in March 2025.
Why the image works
Plenty of channels play similar music. Several things set this one apart:
- It is a companion, not a picture. The girl is doing what you are supposed to be doing. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have written about live streams like this one as companions, and about viewers forming one-sided, parasocial bonds with a character who never speaks.
- It is calm but alive. The loop is short, the motion is small, and the cat and the changing sky give the eye somewhere to rest without demanding attention.
- It is nostalgic for something nobody quite lived. In a 2019 paper, Emma Winston and Lawrence Saywood of Goldsmiths, University of London, explored lofi hip hop’s contradictory relationship with nostalgia, and the Lofi Girl image, a hand-drawn bedroom in a style borrowed from 1990s anime, is a good example.
- There are other people there. The live chat next to the stream turns solitary studying into something shared. The Verge described viewers finding “comfort in the random messages of strangers” there.
Not everyone is a fan. Pitchfork’s Philip Sherburne once described the style of these streams, with their “twee, anime-inspired illustrations of domestic solitude,” as “the musical equivalent of a white-noise coloring book.” That is a fair description of what many listeners want from it.
What the story teaches anyone running a stream
The Lofi Girl history is also a practical lesson in what can go wrong with a 24/7 broadcast: borrowed visuals get taken down, automated systems make mistakes, and copyright claims can be abused. For a look at what it takes to keep a smaller stream like ours on the air, including the incidents, see how our 24/7 lofi stream works. Our wallpapers are AI-generated by this site rather than drawn by an illustrator, and the music on our stream comes from Epidemic Sound and from our own AI-made tracks.
For the musical background behind all of this, from J Dilla and Nujabes to Bandcamp and YouTube, read the history of lofi hip hop.
Sources
- Bromwich, J. E. (2018, May 3). Pirate radio stations explode on YouTube. The New York Times.
- Alexander, J. (2020, February 24). YouTube briefly terminated a popular live stream channel, creating one of the longest videos ever. The Verge.
- Darville, J. (2020, February 24). “Lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to” returns to YouTube after brief ban. The Fader.
- Alexander, J. (2020, April 20). Lo-fi beats to quarantine to are booming on YouTube. The Verge.
- Peters, J. (2021, March 19). ChilledCow puts channel name out to pasture with a rebrand to “Lofi Girl”. The Verge.
- Lofi Girl: YouTube sorry for taking down music stream (2022, July 12). BBC News.
- Hamelin, F. (2020, April 23). Pop culture : la “lofi girl” du live YouTube “lofi hip hop radio” habite… à Lyon. Actu.fr (interview with Juan Pablo Machado, in French).
- Taber, L., Baltaxe-Admony, L. B., & Weatherwax, K. (2019). What makes a live stream companion? Interactions, 27(1), 52–57.
- Winston, E., & Saywood, L. (2019). Beats to relax/study to: Contradiction and paradox in lofi hip hop. IASPM Journal, 9(2), 40–54.
- Sherburne, P. (2021, October 7). 25 microgenres that (briefly) defined the last 25 years. Pitchfork.
- Lofi Girl, Wikipedia (English and French editions), for the channel’s creation date, later streams and collaborations.
