Lofi Girl is a YouTube channel and record label created in 2015 by Dimitri Somoguy under the name ChilledCow. From February 2017 it broadcast lo-fi hip hop around the clock, and its live stream of beats to relax or study to became one of the defining places where the genre is heard. The channel took its current name in March 2021 and passed ten million subscribers in 2022.
The stream’s image is as famous as its music. Early versions used a looping clip of Shizuku, the heroine of Studio Ghibli’s Whisper of the Heart (1995); after that clip was taken down, the channel commissioned an original character in a similar style, animated by the illustrator Juan Pablo Machado and in use from 2018: a girl with headphones writing at a desk beside a window. In July 2022 the streams briefly went offline after copyright claims that YouTube later called abusive. The music is mostly released by the channel’s own label or used with the artists’ permission.