Photo / Lofi Girl
Many are familiar with beats to relax/study to and beats to chill/sleep, two of Lofi Girl’s streams on YouTube.
As the titles suggest, these are downtempo music that helps listeners with specific tasks. The streams were so popular that beats to relax/study to was streaming for 20,843 hours (or the equivalent of two and a half years) before it was taken down on YouTube. Lofi Girl currently has 10.9 million followers.
Lofi Girl announced the takedown on July 10, 2022, saying, “The lofi radios have been taken down because of false copyright strikes, hopefully @YouTubeCreators @YouTube will sort this quickly…”
According to a screenshot Lofi Girl posted, the video beats to relax/study to was reported by a music label based in Malaysia.
YouTube responded the following day with an apology, saying, “confirmed the takedown requests were abusive & terminated the claimant’s account. We’ve resolved the strikes + reinstated your vids – it can sometimes take 24-48 hours for everything to be back to normal! so sorry this happened & thx for your patience as we sorted it out.“
Beats to relax/study to went back up on July 12, while beats to sleep/chill to started streaming again on July 14. As of this story’s posting, the former video has 19,757 people streaming while the latter has 8,810.
Lofi Girl has also released a statement about the takedowns. She said, “Yesterday, Lofi Girl was hit by a false copyright strike on our two livestreams. The strike was retracted earlier today, however the livestreams have since been taken down entirely and not yet reinstated in their original form – hoping for things to return to normal soon.”
She added, “We’re shocked and disappointed to see that there’s still not any kind of protection or manual review of these false claims. At the end of the day, it was entirely out of our control, and the sad part is that there was no way to appeal beforehand/prevent it from happening. Especially since it’s not the first time that something like this happened – like in 2020, where our entire channel was taken down by error.”
In February of 2020, Lofi Girl tweeted a screenshot from YouTube that said that the channel is not in compliance with its Terms and Services, and that the account was terminated.
Lofi Girl said, “Since 2020, we put in our best efforts to maintain high-quality livestreams around the clock for our audience and ensure they comply with streaming policy, leaving no reason for them to be taken down. In turn, we’re extremely fortunate to have a large community supporting Lofi Girl and spreading the news, thankfully the situation will most likely be resolved to some extent.”
The account holder also called for a better reporting system. She said, “More importantly, this event has shone a light on an underlying problem on the platform: it’s 2022, and there are countless smaller creators out there, many of which engaged in this discussion, that continue to be hit daily by these false claims on both videos and livestreams. “
Lofi Girl ended her statement with “Nonetheless, we remain positive and hope that YouTube will consider applying changes to their copyright reporting system to prevent such a situation from reoccurring, and protect all content creators once and for all against this threat.”
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