Lofi Girl — Chill Beats to Relax & Study

Lofi Girl started out as ChilledCow in 2015, and its study stream has been running in one form or another since 2017 — restarted from scratch after YouTube pulled it down in 2020 and again in 2022 — with well over a billion lifetime views. Lofi Records curates the rotation and pulls from a wide roster of producers working in jazzy boom-bap and slow chillhop. It's become the default soundtrack for studying and focus work, mostly because it never demands attention.

I leave it on by default. If I open YouTube without a specific video in mind, this is what plays. The animation has picked up small changes over the years, but the actual sound never really shifts. The stream went down for an hour once and I genuinely felt thrown off.