YouTube Ends Lofi Girl's Two-Year-Old Music Stream Following False DMCA Warning

There are three constants in life: death, taxes, and the "lofi hip hop radio — beats to relax/study to" YouTube stream. That is, until YouTube wrongly hit the Lofi Girl channel with a DMCA takedown, taking the beloved streams offline for the first time in over 2 years.

With over 668 million views, the stream was one of the most popular places on YouTube where people wanted to listen to soothing, yet engaging music while studying or working. Listeners sometimes used the stream's live chat as an anonymous, distant study group, reminding each other to take breaks and drink water. So when the stream suddenly stopped, fans got worried.

YouTube is jammed with streams of soothing music for hours on end, but the live nature of "lofi hip hop radio" streams sets it apart. On the YouTube stream, which is currently showing a message "This live stream recording is not available", one of the main comments reads: "I hope it's not over yet, this stream is rightfully an extremely important part of YouTube culture."< /p>

It's true. Even beyond YouTube, Lofi Girl lives in spin-off communities, including the 30,000-member r/LofiGirl subreddit and a Lofi Girl Discord with 700,000 members. The animation accompanying the 24/7 livestream - a Studio Ghibli-inspired image of a girl wearing headphones and studying while her cat gazes out the window at a cityscape - was honored in cosplay, reproduced by Will Smith and recreated on Cartoon Network. YouTube channel with a character from "Steven Universe".

Yesterday, Lofi Girl addressed the sudden takedown in a tweet, stating that "lofi radios have been taken down due to fake copyright strikes". In response, Lofi Girl fans circulated the tag #BringBackLofiGirl to get YouTube's attention. Some even went so far as to spam and troll FMC Music, the Malaysian label that allegedly filed the bogus copyright complaint, while others created fan art.

Lofi Girl told TechCrunch that all of the channel's music is released through her label, Lofi Records, so they have the rights to share it. Since Lofi Girl owns the proper rights to the music, YouTube has determined that the account does not violate copyright laws. The platform responded to Lofi Girl on Twitter on Monday, stating that the missing live videos should be restored within 24-48 hours.

TechCrunch reached out to YouTube for comment, and a spokesperson linked us to the company's existing response to Lofi Girl on Twitter.

If the above is true, the next Lofi Girl stream will have to start over from the beginning, rather than continuing the existing 2-year-old stream. In 2020, the channel faced a similar problem when an accidental suspension ended its 13,000 hour stream. In this case, YouTube also acknowledged its mistakes and reinstated the account, but the same problems apparently returned.

"This event brought to light an underlying issue on the platform: it's 2022, and there are countless smaller creators, many of whom have participated in this discussion, who continue to be impacted daily by these false claims on both videos and live streams,” Lofi Girl wrote in a tweet.

Today, in YouTube's response to Lofi Girl, the company said the takedown requests were "abusive," meaning they were exploited as an att...