Really, however, all of this can be traced back to British DJ Kenny Everett, a friend of Queen, “accidentally” playing a pre-release Bohemian Rhapsody on his Capital FM show in October 1975.
The bridging song of the internet age was Crazy Frog that became a hit single in 2005 after finding its way online in 1997 and eventually being used in TV ads six years later for ringtone company Jamba. This was subsequently perfected in 2009 by Susan Boyle with her Britain’s Got Talent audition that turned her, for a short time, into the biggest-selling female artist in the world despite coming second on the show.īefore that, adverts were the fast-track to tentative viral success, with both Babylon Zoo and Stiltskin having UK No 1 singles from appearances in ads for Levi’s. Pre-dating this was a weird transitional melding of old media (TV) catching a wave on new media (online video), first tested by the unspeakable Cheeky Girls with their equally unspeakable Cheeky Song (Touch My Bum) spinoff from their 2002 Popstars: The Rivals audition in the UK. He managed to avoid one-hit wonder status with Gentleman the following year, but that was less proof of concept and more about it being accidentally sucked through in the slipstream. Psy became the world’s first South Korean pop megastar in 2012 with Gangnam Style, which is still the most-viewed video on YouTube and a No 1 single in over 30 countries. The grim antecedents of today’s structured viral hits are videos – something that could only have happened in the past 11 years due to the reach of YouTube – that were deemed meta-ironically as being “so bad they’re good”.
Songs are announced as viral hits on launch, semantically bulldozing through what “viral” actually means, perhaps reaching its nadir with the ghastly contrivance of Rockie Gold’s Dicks Out For Harambe. We can see this today, the air thick with the tang of desperation, as tracks are propelled by endless Musical.ly videos and vloggers shamelessly bankrolling themselves with “promoted content”. The idea of a “viral hit” long ago stopped being something that just happened to a song and became, through contrivance and orchestration, a core part of the marketing plot.