This episode originally aired on Decoder Ring.

Baby Shark is a mega viral YouTube video, an unstoppable earworm, a top 40 hit, a Eurodance smash, a decades old campfire song, and the center of an international copyright dispute. In this episode from the podcast Decoder Ring, we explore the strange history of the song, what makes it so catchy, and who it really belongs to today.

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Coast Highway by Sound of Picture
Boop by Sound of Picture

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View Transcript ▶︎

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz. I’m Dallas Taylor.

[music in]

If you have toddlers or young kids, you knew from the moment you read the title what this show is about… and frankly, I’m kind of worried you’re not listening right now because of it. But if you did decide to tap the play button, I want you to know that you’ll be glad you did.. And for those of you who don’t regularly hang out with young kids, you probably have no idea where this is going, which is perfect.

So, for the latter group, there’s a youtube video of a kids song called Baby Shark that, at the time of me recording this, has 3 point 4 billion views. That billion with a B. It’s also currently the 7th most viewed youtube video of all time, and it’s a kids song. How in the world did that happen?

Well, the story behind Baby Shark goes a lot deeper than you’d expect. Its history spans decades, and illustrates how art can be adapted across cultures and genres. There’s quite a strange story behind this viral sensation.

[music out]

Today’s story comes from the podcast Decoder Ring. Here’s host Willa Paskin.

Willa: About a year ago, Jonathan Wright, a DJ and a children's musician who goes by the stage name Johnny Only, started getting strange comments on his YouTube page.

Jonathan: I don't read my YouTube comments very much, but I did start seeing comments. "Hey, there's a song out there exactly like yours, ya know."

Willa: These comments refer to a song Johnny often performed for toddlers and that he had posted on YouTube in 2011. It came with a video that he'd recorded with his kids and his sister's kids at her pool.

[Music clip: Johnny Only’s Baby Shark]

Willa: This song was perfect for three-year-olds. It has simple lyrics, an oft-repeated chorus, and hand motions that correspond to each verse of the song, which little kids love.

Jonathan: I knew my kids well enough that I knew that it was going to be a hit before I even recorded it, ya know.

Willa: The song did well for Johnny, but it wasn't massively popular or anything. It still has less than 100,000 views on YouTube. But it was an important part of his show for years. Then he started to get those comments.

Jonathan: I go to look for it. It was Pinkfong's version.

[Music clip: Baby Shark Pinkfong’s version]

Willa: This song is called Baby Shark, and that version comes from the South Korean children's entertainment company, Pinkfong. If you don't have a little kid, or know a little kid, or know a little kid's parents, you may not know this song, though that's about to change. Unlike Johnny's version, this version of Baby Shark is extremely, extremely popular. It is beloved by small children.

[SFX clip: child singing Baby Shark]

Willa: That, by the way, is one of my small children singing it. But it has also been performed on talk shows all over the world, tweeted about by famous people, and inspired a viral video dance challenge.

[SFX clip: Baby Shark dance challenge]

Willa: It's been performed by celebrities.

[SFX clip: “Please welcome Sophie Turner” (Sophie Turner singing Baby Shark)]

Willa: It inspired countless covers in different genres.

[SFX clip: Baby Shark alternative version]

Willa: In January 2019, Baby Shark even debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 where it has been as high as number 32. In other words, Baby Shark is a top 40 hit and that, like all of this, is not normal for a song whose target audience just stopped wearing diapers. Baby Shark is a massively popular, Billboard-charting, unstoppably catchy, super-sticky earworm that has endured for decades, gone viral multiple times, and become the subject of an international copyright dispute. Baby Shark is not just a song. Baby Shark is a phenomenon.

Willa: I have had Baby Shark stuck in my head for months. I have two small children and, like a lot of small children, they are totally obsessed with it. As I've heard Baby Shark, and sung Baby Shark, and made up new words to Baby Shark, I have had occasion to wonder, "Who is responsible for this unstoppable earworm?"

Willa: We're going to try to answer that question, starting with the present-day, viral version of Baby Shark, and then swing backwards through time into the song's past of which Johnny Only is just one part. "Where does Baby Shark come from?"

Willa: Let's start with a company that made the viral version of Baby Shark, the aforementioned South Korean company, Pinkfong.

[SFX clip: Pinkfong]

Willa: That's the Pinkfong logo tone, which plays at the beginning of all of their videos, a bit of sonic branding. Since being founded in 2010 by another South Korean company called SmartStudy, Pinkfong has produced more than 4,000 animated videos and stories for children, many of them poppy renditions of kids' songs in the public domain like Mr. Sun and Five Monkeys Jumping on the Bed.

[Music clip: Pinkfong’s Five Monkeys Jumping on the Bed]

Willa: In 2018, Pinkfong had 5.7 billion views across all of its content, and its YouTube channel has 15 million subscribers. Just to put that in perspective, Sesame Street only has 5 million subscribers. Children's entertainment is a world unto itself on YouTube, a bubble populated primarily by a strange but very lucrative genre of super-popular videos expressly designed for toddlers that unless you've got kids, you probably have no idea exists.

Alexis: Little kids' entertainment, like toddler entertainment, is it's totally YouTube driven, it's basically all music videos for kids, and it's like wildly international.

Willa: That's Alexis Madrigal, a staff writer for the Atlantic, who's reported on the types of companies that make these sorts of videos.

Alexis: There are companies in Dubai, India, Hong Kong, South Korea. Turns out that this is kind of a universal thing that you can make. It's like a highly-scalable, across the world kind of entertainment form.

Willa: Alexis estimates there are about a dozen or two dozen major companies doing this sort of work and hundreds of smaller ones. Their videos generally have a similar aesthetic, bright symbol animation with big-eyed human or animal characters often doing funny dance moves to upbeat and catchy songs with pop music flourishes.

[Music clip: Johnny Johnny Yes Papa]

Willa: That song, which you may have noticed bear some sonic similarities to Baby Shark, is called Johnny Johnny Yes Papa and it went viral in 2014. For adults who were raised on Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers, or even Dora the Explorer, 30-minute to an hour programs that have a gentle vibe and a clear, well-executed pedagogical vision. These videos can feel like they lack a purpose, you know, besides generating clicks. But kids all over the world are clicking on these things, which means that whatever their flaws, they are unprecedented.

Alexis: Children's entertainment produced all over the world soldered together from all the different world's cultures. Yeah. It's just this new melange of cultures that didn't exist before. Like, you couldn't really make this exist in any real other medium in particular because all these companies copy from each other relentlessly. You know, the Indians copying from the South Koreans copying from the Russians copying from the guys in Dubai or Israel, you know? And then that is making money for YouTube in the United States of America and being shown to people in the Philippines.

Willa: In a world in which entertainment is increasingly segmented, Pinkfong and companies like it have created a kind of global shared experience for three-year-olds. Baby Shark is part of a wild and strange monoculture for toddlers, a demographic that doesn't much care about language, cultural-specific taste, or adult measures of quality. To be fair to Pinkfong, in South Korea, it's considered to be a trustworthy educational company. If its educational bent is lost on English-speaking audiences, that's because we already know what Pinkfong videos are trying to teach, English.

Willa: Baby Shark is a good, simple vocabulary lesson, but the video has been so successful because it also works as pure entertainment. In the video, which was posted in June of 2016, a boy and a girl trade versus and do very specific hand motions, the Baby Shark dance, in front of simple, colorful, aquatic animation. For the verse about Baby Shark, for example, the boy does a little finger pinch that's supposed to be the baby shark's jaws going up and down. The girl uses her whole hands for mama shark. Daddy shark gets both arms. For the let's go hunting verse, they do a particularly cute gesture, pressing their hands together above their heads like they are shark fins and swaying back and forth.

Willa: All these motions make the song extremely appealing to toddlers who love a song that comes with movements. Think of Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes, If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands, The Hokey Pokey, The Itsy Bitsy Spider, honestly, most songs for toddlers. But it also made the song appealing to another demographic entirely, South Korean pop singers.

[Music clip: Baby Shark pop version]

Willa: That's the girl group, Red Velvet, in a Baby Shark-inflected ad for lip gloss. K-pop, Korean pop is a very competitive field and it stars are constantly trying to reach as broad an audience as possible, not just the teenagers who make up their core fan base. One of the ways to reach that broader audience is on variety shows, which are extremely popular in Korea and Asia, more generally, and where goofing around with a meme, particularly one that is a children's song, is a good, and reliable, and cute way to appeal to a lot of people.

[SFX clip: Variety show, Baby Shark meme]

Willa: The K-pop stars amplified Baby Shark both as a song and as a viral sensation. More and more regular people began to dance to Baby Shark, recording their own routines to it, and posting them on Tik Tok, an extremely popular app in Asia where you post short clips of yourself lip-syncing and dancing along to a song. Meanwhile, Pinkfong has kept up with the craze by releasing over 100 different versions of the song in 11 different languages. There's now an EDM version of Baby Shark, and a Halloween version, and a Valentine's day version.

Willa: Throughout 2017 and 2018, the song just kept growing and growing, moving around the world until it caught on in the United States, first and foremost with kids who liked it so much, they helped propel it up the Billboard charts.

Chris: I'm not sure there's a real precedent for Baby Shark.

Willa: Chris Molanphy is a host of Slate's Hit Parade podcast and an expert on all things having to do with the Billboard charts. As Chris explained to me, there are a few kids songs that have charted on the Hot 100 before, The Chipmunk Song, a Christmas song, went to number one in 1958. Rubber Ducky from Sesame Street has also been on the charts, so have a number of novelty hits that aren't necessarily kids' songs but that really appealed to kids like Monster Mash and Psy's Gangnam Style, another K-pop crossover mega-hit. But those songs appeal to kids who are like school-aged kids, and the kids who are into Baby Shark are much littler.

Chris: It's the kind of record that somebody under the age of, I don't know, six might hit again, again, again on. That YouTube data factors into the chart and has made it an enormous hit.

Willa: But this raises the question, "Why have all of the animated kids songs that are out there on YouTube do toddlers like this one best? Why did this one breakout here?" Here, I think we have to turn to the song itself. Yes, the Baby Shark video is adorable, but that song, it's catchy.

Charlie: Well, the song is successful because it perfectly balances familiarity, repetition with novelty.

Willa: That's Charlie Harding, a musician and the cohost of Switched on Pop, a podcast that takes pop songs and explains why and how they work.

Charlie: That the melody itself is nursery rhyme, which very simple... Like, it's very memorable, and it has a sort of rhythmic bounciness to it. So it just catches in your ear, and you get it over and over and over again, which you think you should get bored but you don't. The reason why you don't get bored is every time they sing that repeated melody, something changes. So the first time they sing it, it's just a bunch of kids and a bass.

[Music clip: Baby Shark Intro]

Charlie: And then they start adding in hi-hats the second time around [Music clip: Baby Shark with hi-hats]. Then, the next time when you get daddy shark, you get this deep baritone voice [Music clip: Baby Shark with baritone voice]. So the baritone voice was kind of surprising. You get grandma voice, and grandma voice is surprising within the context of what you've heard before [Music clip: Baby Shark with grandma voice]. Then they add keys, and then they add more voices. There's like a chorus of kids that comes in and then, at that point, you've now heard like six or seven of the Baby Shark refrain and they modulate into another key. They take the whole thing higher, which is a very common trope of like '80s and '90s ballads.

[Music clip: Baby Shark continues]

Charlie: Once they do that, they even add even more arrangement. There's more of these piano arpeggios just... At that point, everything drops out except for maybe a kick drum and the voice. Then, last time, everything comes back in. So there's a way of doing the exact same thing over and over again by providing just enough variation that you stay interested.

Willa: I love Charlie's explanation of Baby Shark. Before talking with him, I had never noticed any of that. And I've listened to Baby Shark a lot. Charlie's explanation also made me find Baby Shark a lot less annoying. The fact that there's all this slight variation to it that keeps kids interested, it made me think about how repetition and variation work for adults. Yes, we're more sophisticated listeners than four-year-olds, or I hope we are, but we also like repetition so long as it has the right amount of variation.

Willa: We want the pop song to come back to the hook or the orchestral music to return to the motif. When a song gets it just right, I don't know about you, but I do listen to it dozens of times in a row. And we do the same thing with what we watch. We watch movies and TV shows we've seen before and seek out specific genres, crime shows, or superhero movies, or whatever's happening on Twitter where we basically know exactly what's going to happen. It's just the details that are different.

[music in]

It’s undeniable, Baby Shark is catchy, and it sticks with you long after you’ve heard it. But the story of Baby Shark didn’t start on YouTube. It actually didn’t even start on the internet. The origin of the song is somewhat of a mystery, and it spans decades. We’ll explore where this song really came from and who Baby Shark belongs to today, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

Willa: Pinkfong's version of Baby Shark is especially sticky, but I think that there's something elementally enticing and irreducibly catchy about Baby Shark no matter what its arrangement. And I think this because the Pinkfong version, it's not the first time that Baby Shark has gone viral. So now, in order to chase down Baby Shark's origins, we're going to have to leave the present and start moving backwards into the past and the early days of YouTube.

[music out]

Alexandra: My name is Alexandra Mueller. I am from Germany.

Willa: In 2006, Alexandra Mueller was working at a camp for kids teaching journalism. There was a song they sang at the camp called the Kleiner Hai [Music clip]. Kleiner Hai means little shark in German. As you can hear, the song has a different tune than Baby Shark, but it's recognizably related. The verses mean more or less the same thing and it comes with all of the same hand motions.

[Music clip continued]

Willa: Some of the campers recorded Alexandra singing Kleiner Hai and in January of 2007, she uploaded the video to her YouTube channel under the name Alemuel, an abbreviation of her first and last name. In the video, which is pretty grainy, Alexandra is sitting in a retro, pea-green armchair wearing a teal sweater and a bright red headband. Her emotions are exaggerated and very distinct. She gradually gets more and more into it until she gets to the daddy shark, and she starts using her whole body. It's weird but extremely watchable. And people watched it.

Alexandra: I think it took about a half a year that it got a million views, and then emails started to pour in asking me for interviews, like, "You're a viral video and its German. Can we ask you about it?" Then, a record company wrote to me and said, "Hey, you're so famous in the Internet, can we do a recording of the song?"

Willa: This record company was EMI, the giant label that's released music by the Beatles, Duran Duran, Kate Bush, and thousands more. She recorded new vocals for a dance-oriented version of Kleiner Hai [Music clip]. The song became a smash. In 2008, it spent 16 weeks on the German singles chart, peaking at number 25. Alexandra became something of a viral sensation herself. She released the song under the name Alemuel, the name that had been on her YouTube channel. And there was a lot of speculation about who she really was.

[Music clip continued]

Willa: This was further fueled by her outfit, the teal turtleneck and the red headband, which she wore to all of her public appearances like she was playing a character. She had a lot of public appearances in 2008. She went on a number of German talk shows, toured clubs in Germany and Austria, and played two performances in Mallorca [Music clip]. Her performances did not always go exactly as planned.

Alexandra: The people in the clubs were too old. My kind of fan group were a 14, 15-year-olds. I think in the clubs, there were like 25-30 and they often kind of stared at me with wide eyes asking themselves why they should kind of perform a children's song with me.

Willa: By 2009, the Kleiner Hai craze had wound down. EMI offer Alexandra the opportunity to record another song, a kids' song about a fish, but she declined. She went into journalism instead.

Alexandra: People often ask me if I'm embarrassed that this happened to me. But no, it was great and I'm really happy that I just jumped into the cold water and swam without being eaten by a shark. It helped me a lot, I think. I gained a lot of self-esteem because if you're booed from stage, then you're much cooler afterwards, I'd say.

Willa: Her young daughter recently found out about Kleiner Hai in school.

Alexandra: One of the women who work there, she's shown her the video. I didn't do that. Now, she wants to see it all the time. If somebody says, “hai shark”, then she immediately starts doing the gestures.

Willa: Okay. So how is it possible that an American children's musician, a South Korean entertainment company, and a German camp counselor all recorded different but successful versions of a song about a baby shark? To answer that, we have to go back even further in time.

Rebecca: So I think it was about 1989 or 1990, and I was at summer camp in New Hampshire, Camp Merrowvista. It was one of our favorite songs. We loved it.

Willa: That's Rebecca Onion. She's a writer and colleague of ours at Slate, and she is one of the many, many kids who sang Baby Shark in the '80s and '90s when it was just a song kids sang at camp, and school, and after school, and Girl Scouts, and Sunday school, and wherever kids gather and sing songs. There were hundreds of different versions of it. There are some with different tunes, just as there are German versions. There are French versions where it's usually called “Papa Le Cat” that sometimes, but not always, is sung to the tune of Mahna Mahna, the song made famous by the Muppets.

[Music clip: Papa Le Cat]

Willa: But even with all the variation, these versions have similar gestures and almost all of them have something else too, violence. [Music clip: “shark attack...”] There are a lot of variations to the violence, but it seems to be what made the song.

Rebecca: Speaker 10: And then it would be [Music clip: “shark attack...”], and you kind of like would move your body around as though you were being attacked by a shark violently. That was the funnest parts for everyone because we'd all be like, "Oh my God, we're dying." And kind of like lie on the ground.

Willa: The grizzly parts, which are not in the Pinkfong version or a number of other versions of the song on YouTube, including Johnny Only's, made it a little edgy and therefore fun for older kids, teenagers even and why the song was not, until recently, primarily for toddlers. Violence, I think it's a clue about Baby Shark's origins. We kept looking for earlier and earlier versions of Baby Shark. In print, we dug around and found a version of it in a book called Making Music Fun, that was first published in 1981 and that already refers to there being many different versions of the song. Then we spoke to Patricia Shehan Campbell, an ethnomusicologist at the University of Washington and an expert in children's musical culture, who also happens to have worked as a camp counselor in Ohio in the 1970s.

Patricia: This might've been the mid, late '70s, something like that. The song came up on a bus one time, and so I learned it from a child. Every child knew it, actually, already, and it sounded pretty much the same as it does now.

Willa: I asked Pat if it was possible that all of these different versions of Baby Shark had popped up spontaneously, a kind of polygenesis, like the way emus and ostriches evolved on different continents. She was skeptical.

Patricia: That'd be a little farfetched, given that the gestures is just very explicit, could've been separately created without some influence. But I don't know how to connect the dots.

Willa Paskin: We kept looking for a record or memory of Baby Shark before the mid to late 1970s, but we couldn't find one. Then, it occurred to us that there was something happening around this time that was extremely relevant. To be clear, we are now entering the realm of speculation, but honestly, what's the first thing you think of when you think of a shark attack?

[SFX: Jaws theme]

Willa: Steven Spielberg's Jaws was released in the summer of 1975, and it was a huge deal. Huge deal almost undersells it. Besides almost single-handedly creating the blockbuster as we know it today, the movie spread through all parts of American culture. The film industry began producing cheap copycats with titles like Piranha and Orca. There was a video game about sharks, and Saturday morning shark cartoons, and a recurring Saturday Night Live sketch about a shark, and there were tons of novelty records, songs that took John Williams famous theme music and riffed on it.

[Music clip: Jaws by Lalo Schifrin]

Willa: That's an instrumental disco version of the theme by Lalo Schifrin called Jaws that samples William's score. In this next one, Do the Jaws by the End, the song starts with some shark hysteria and there's a beat derived from the Jaws theme [Music clip]. This next one is my favorite. It's called Jaws is Working for the CIA, a novelty funk record by The Investigators, and it starts with a reference to a family of Jaws [Music clip].

Willa: I'm not saying any of these songs directly inspired Baby Shark, but I am saying that they're evidence of the shark-crazy atmosphere at the time and of ubiquity of the Jaws' theme song. If those things inspired a number of musicians, maybe they inspired some camp counselors too [Music clip continued]. If the jump from this song to this song to this song [SFX: Jaws theme] sounds big, remember the Baby Shark was transmitted orally and the jump from “da na da na da na” to “ do do do do do do” with about a dozen stops along the way, that sounds more like a game of telephone.

Willa: In fact, there's a version of Baby Shark song by various Girl Scout troops to this day. It's more of a chant than a song that ties Baby Shark and Jaws together very nicely because it's a version of Baby Shark about a specific shark family, a family of Jaws [Music clip: Girl Scout Jaw song]. So Jaws, that is our provisional answer to where Baby Shark comes from. The fact that it's made it to us over four decades later means that the song and the Jaws' theme music that may have inspired it has always been viral. This is what analog virality looks like, something so catchy that it's passed from person to person, kid to kid, counselor to counselor, musician to musician until it makes its way around the world, slightly different each time but still fundamentally itself, so crisscrossed and cross-pollinated, it's hard to untangle where exactly it started at all.

Willa: So now, we're going to move out of the past and head back to the present. But we're not going to get all the way there just yet because there's still a bit of a gap in the where did Baby Shark come from mystery, which is, "How exactly did Pinkfong find Baby Shark and decide to make their own video with it?" I initially thought this would be pretty straightforward to answer. We talked to someone at Pinkfong, but Pinkfong declined to speak with us and then declined and then declined. To be fair, they are in the middle of a huge wave of attention and I'm sure there are lots of people asking to speak with them.

Willa: But then we learned about Johnny Only, the children's performer who we spoke with at the very beginning of this episode. It became clear that there are some good reasons why Pinkfong might want to be vague about how they discovered Baby Shark. To explore those good reasons, we have to get back to Johnny Only's story. Just a reminder, this is what Johnny Only's version of Baby Shark sounds like.

[Music clip: Johnny Only’s Baby Shark]

Willa: He had first heard the song in the late 1990s while performing at summer camps. He had made some changes to it, like removing the verses about grandma and grandpa shark, but it's not like he had written the thing. So when he heard Pinkfong's version of the song, he thought that was that.

Jonathan: You know, I felt a little bit violated. I was just like, "Oh well, it's public domain, it's public domain. That's the way it goes."

Willa: But then, a representative from a South Korean political party, the Liberty Korea Party, an opposition party, contacted Johnny, asking him for permission to use his version of Baby Shark.

Jonathan: So I just gave them permission.

Willa: So the Liberty Korea Party used the song, at which point, SmartStudy, the company that owns Pinkfong, got involved, threatening a lawsuit against the Liberty Korea Party for copyright infringement.

Jonathan: So all of a sudden, as you can imagine, the lights are going off. I'm like, "Wait a minute. SmartStudy doesn't even realize that it's my version instead of theirs." There's a big red flag. Too, SmartStudy is saying, "Okay, I can sue you for copyright infringement." So all of a sudden I'm like saying, "Wait a minute, that means that I could sue for copyright infringement." You know what I mean?

Willa: There is something called a derivative copyright, meaning that when something like a public domain song, which Baby Shark is considered to be, gets recorded, things that are changed or added to it that are unique to that recording are protected under copyright law. So Johnny got a lawyer and filed a petition in Korean court, which as of this recording, is still pending. He isn't saying that he invented Baby Shark, but he is saying that he added things to his version, that Pinkfong then used in their version.

Jonathan: The key is exactly the same. You know, the driving beat is the same. The tempo increase partway through is the same. The way that they add the harmonies like when daddy shark comes onto the scene. In my recording, I used my voice as a lower voice to emulate daddy shark and they suddenly have a male voice coming in for daddy shark. So it was very similar approaches.

Willa: I want to be really clear here that I have no idea if Pinkfong heard Johnny Only's version of Baby Shark before making their own. But if it wasn't his, it was probably someone's. I mean, they had to have learned it from somewhere. Maybe someone who worked there sang it at summer camp. There's a risk for Pinkfong in revealing if the song comes from any one source because, among other things, there is now a huge amount of money at stake. Pinkfong's parent company's stock price is soaring. The videos are generating ad revenue hand over fist. There's tons of Baby Shark merchandise, and the company just signed a deal with Netflix to create a TV series. Pinkfong is hoping Baby Shark isn't just some flash in the pan, but the beginning of a global children's media empire.

Willa: I'm of two minds about all of this. The entire history of Baby Shark is an iterative one of people taking other people's version of it and changing it, massaging the tune, and the lyrics, and the language, sometimes for the better. Johnny Only and Pinkfong's version sound pretty similar, but Pinkfong's version is catchier. Why should Pinkfong have to worry that they learned the song somewhere and made it their own? That's what everyone else has always done.

Willa: But, at the same time, the history of Baby Shark also shows us that this song belongs to everyone. There's something kind of unsettling about the fact that right now it seems to belong to Pinkfong, who has real financial incentives to try and make it more and more proprietary. A representative of Pinkfong and SmartStudy recently told the CBC, "We are the producer and publisher. We own and control 100% of the song." Many people already think that that's true. And that's why for Johnny, even if he ends up winning his lawsuit, the emotional stakes are settled.

Jonathan: The Pinkfong version is so popular that even my fans prefer theirs over mine now, which is very depressing. You know, it's really kind of disheartening. I mean, they're very kind about it. My fans tell me my version was better. They're very kind about it. But, honestly, I know when they go home, the Pinkfong version is everywhere. I'm watching my audiences as I'm performing my version. Of course, my version does not have grandma shark and grandpa shark, and my audience, as I go into the next line, and they're starting to make the hand motion for grandma shark and it hurts. It hurts. It hurts a lot. It is really discouraging. It's really derailed me in many ways.

Willa: I hope Johnny takes some comfort in the long history of Baby Shark, of which Pinkfong is just a small part. I don't know, maybe their version of the song will help them spawn a children's media empire, but maybe it's just a novelty, another viral craze that has captured our attention right now, for this moment, and that we won't even remember in a few years. But when I say, "We," there, I mean us adults. As Baby Shark demonstrates, both the internet and children's culture are Petri dishes for virality, for memes, for things that get passed from person to person, altered and tweaked, but that stay essentially themselves.

Willa: The story of Baby Shark, in some ways, is this story of these two meme-generating powerhouses joining forces to amplify this song. This will not be the last time that this happens. The amount of video content being directed at kids is only going to increase as is the amount of time they spend in front of screens. It's hard to make a song as catchy as Baby Shark, but someone will manage it, maybe by rifling through children's songs of the past again. When they do, they will have an even bigger audience of three-year-olds all around the world doing exactly what they did with Baby Shark, watching and singing it over and over again.

[music in]

Willa: One of the funny things about Baby Shark is that this two-minute video that was designed for little kids' very short attention spans is going to live on longer in their collective memory than it is in the memory of most adults. For us, Baby Shark is a passing fad, yet another fleeting internet meme. But for kids, Baby Shark doesn't just exist on the internet, it's not some pop-culture object, something cute to share on social media. It's outside of all of that too, part of an older but still viral, still vital way of communicating. If the history of Baby Shark tells us anything, it's that the version of Baby Shark that was made to last is the version you can sing however you want. So, if you can bear it, keep singing.

That story came from Willa Paskin and the fantastic podcast Decoder Ring. In each episode, they examine the history, meaning, and importance behind an aspect of our culture. Be sure to go tap the subscribe button!

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team dedicated to making television, film and games sound incredible. Find out more at defactosound.com

This episode was produced by Colin DeVarney and me, Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was edited and mixed by Colin DeVarney.

If there’s another earworm you just can’t get out of your head that you think would be a great Twenty Thousand Hertz episode, tell us! You can reach me and the rest of the team on facebook, twitter, or by writing at hi @ 20k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

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