The internet’s favourite music livestream, which provided more than two years of “lo-fi” background music for hundreds of millions of people studying or working late into the night, was removed by YouTube on Sunday night after a Malaysian music label lodged a fake copyright dispute.
Two live videos, “beats to relax/study to” and “beats to sleep/chill to”, featured 24/7 streams of low-fidelity, instrumental hip-hop music, and gained close to 800 million listeners since the channel Lofi Girl began streaming the videos February 2020, although earlier iterations had been posted since 2015.
Lofi Girl’s famous two-year-long stream was removed by YouTube over a bogus copyright claimCredit:Lofi Girl / YouTube
Lofi Girl, founded by a French creator known only as Dimitri, owns the rights to all the music it plays via its music label, Lofi Records. But YouTube removed both streams from its platform after it received a takedown notice from FMC Music, which claimed the livestream featured one of its tracks. YouTube removed the video and threatened to disable the Lofi Girl channel if it was found to breach copyright again.
After a social media backlash, YouTube, which automatically accepts copyright claims without verifying them, investigated FMC Music and found it was “abusive” in its use of the copyright claim system, and terminated the account.
Unlike regular, highly produced music, low-fidelity music, or lo-fi, embraces imperfections that might otherwise be seen as flaws. With a mostly lyric-free grainy sound mixing jazz, hip-hop and soul, the purposely imperfect beats have come to occupy a unique space in internet culture. With more than one billion views on the Lofi Girl channel alone, students the world over have used the genre to help focus over the last decade.
There’s a science to it, too: lo-fi music is believed to positively affect listeners’ moods, which in turn helps boost productivity.
The stream’s cover image features an animated woman known as Jade. She has become an internet icon, with the Studio Ghibli-esque character being referenced in popular culture multiple times.
The Lofi Girl account said it was “shocked and disappointed to see that there’s still not any kind of protection or manual review of these false claims.”
“[The takedown] was entirely out of our control, and the sad part is that there was no way to appeal beforehand,” it tweeted.
Legal experts say the takedown highlights the difficulties creators face in publishing content in a highly restrictive copyright environment like YouTube.
Takedown notices “can be initiated by anyone, but supposedly an owner who claims to own the material,” says Tomoyuki Hachigo, co-founder of startup-focused legal firm Sprintlaw.“Basically it’s up to the recipient of the takedown notice to prove they own the copyright.”
“YouTube says they have a team making sure the claims are valid but they get so many so I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of false ones get through,” he says.
“It is a complicated system, there’s a lot of legal stuff there, so I can understand the confusion and frustration of small content creators and the fans who rely on Lofi Girl to study and relax.”
YouTube says it is working to reinstate the channel’s videos, but it is unclear when the livestream will return.
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