"lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to" was the title of a YouTube livestream started on 25 February 2017 by the channel then called ChilledCow, now Lofi Girl. The stream ran around the clock with an animated girl studying at her desk, and its title described not a genre but a use: music for relaxing and studying. It became one of YouTube's most-watched streams, spawned endless "beats to ___ to" jokes, and gave a whole genre its everyday name.
The stream
ChilledCow was created in France in 2015 by Dimitri Somoguy. In February 2017 it began streaming lofi hip-hop 24 hours a day, branded as music for people who were working or studying.
The first version of the stream used a looping clip from the Studio Ghibli film Whisper of the Heart. It was taken down over that footage in the summer of 2017 and came back with an original animation: a girl in headphones writing at her desk, a cat on the windowsill, a city through the window. The artist, Juan Pablo Machado, drew the version most people know in 2018; the view outside is based on the Croix-Rousse hill in Lyon.
The meme
The title was so plain and so specific that it became a template. Parodies appeared everywhere: "beats to cry to", "beats to procrastinate to", "beats to stare out of a train window to". The joke worked because everyone understood the original: a stream you don't watch, you just leave on.
The takedowns
The stream has been knocked offline more than once:
- February 2020: YouTube removed the channel briefly and restored it after an outcry. The original stream had been running for about 13,000 hours.
- July 2022: two streams were taken down after copyright claims from a label whose account turned out to have been hacked. YouTube called the claims abusive, and the streams came back two days later.
Each time, the reaction showed how many people treat it as part of their routine.
Lofi Girl
On 18 March 2021, six years after it started, ChilledCow renamed itself Lofi Girl, after the character who had become its identity. By mid-2026 it had about 15.8 million subscribers and several 24/7 streams for different moods (Wikipedia has the full history).
Why the title stuck
Most genre names describe sound: jazz, house, ambient. "Beats to relax/study to" described a job. It told you exactly when to press play. That's why lofi spread beyond people who care about hip-hop production: you don't need to know what a sample is to know you have an essay due.
It also set the look of the whole genre. Almost every lofi channel since, ours included, has a window, a lamp, a desk or a cat somewhere. What is lofi music covers the sound behind it, and the best lofi YouTube channels covers who else is streaming now.
Our version of the idea
We took the same lesson and sorted our music by what you're doing rather than by genre: lofi for studying, lofi for coding, lofi for sleep, and the radio for when you'd rather not choose.
Written by Suman Kumar with AI help and checked before publishing. Numbers about our own music come from our Spotify for Artists and DistroKid exports; other sources are linked in the post.