Songs that became famous because of a system glitch

There's a City Pop record called 'Plastic Love', by Mariya Takeuchi, that, for some reason, shows up in Youtube's suggestions whenever you search for City Pop, Japanese 80s, Vaporwave, or a number of other searches. I've read that this is some kind of fluke, a glitch in Youtube's algorithm. As a consequence, it's been streamed by over 20 million youtubers, the album has been re-released, it has an official video, Madonna has recorded a cover of it, and it's one of the most famous Japanese pop songs outside of Japan.

Similarly, there's an OK record called 'New For U' by Andrés that Discogs will suggest whenever you search for almost any house record. As a result, this became one of the very most wanted LPs on Discogs. I can't find the list now, but it was way up there. I also read somewhere that this was a glitch in Discogs' algorithm.

It reminded me of a time when I tried to write my own script on my Linux computer. It was supposed to start my computer up at 7am, then play a random song from my collection. Instead, it always played the first song, alphabetically. Then I tried to get it randomize by artist, but then it just played the first artist, alphabetically. This meant that no matter what I did, I always woke up to '96 Tears' by ? And The Mysterions. It was like Groundhog day. I gave up on the script.

Anyway, this all made me wonder if any other songs have become famous because of a glitch, or a programming technicality.

yeah once it got rolling plastic love would constantly show up in recommended videos from extremely unrelated things, not even just other music vids. dunno if they've fixed it, i haven't seen it pop up in a while

it always played the first song, alphabetically

Our car does this — whenever it connects via Bluetooth to my wife’s phone, it plays “Abandoned Castle of My Soul,” by the Gothic Archies (sometimes very loudly). This has made the song famously reviled in our household.

That's funny. I think I'll always have a negative association with 96 Tears now, too. As soon as I hear that Vox Continental play I get tense.

amine's "caroline" was the first song listed on the first spotify "fresh finds" playlist, grew into a top 20 hit. not a system glitch, but a stroke of immeasurable luck.

I'm currently running a summer camp, and the morning assembly playlist comes from my phone. So every time I get in my car after work bluetooth connects and I Gotta Feeling starts playing.

"new for u" was a massive summer anthem in 2012 (at least on "serious" deep house dance floors)

this is not to say that this is an imaginary phenomenon, but "new for u" is not a good example of this phenomenon

Yeah, “New For U” was in high demand from the moment it was released, and was re-pressed shortly after, and really elevated Andrés’ profile very quickly.

This meant that no matter what I did, I always woke up to '96 Tears' by ? And The Mysterions.

I would probably be OK with this tbh

used to be the first song in my library, sorted by artist, was "the world's greatest sinner" by the a-bones

mariya takeuchi probably deserves better than to be the joe rogan of city pop

smdh Andrés is respected and often great

Mariya Takeuchi was a huge pop star in Japan afaik

idk this stuff just seems like an uninteresting butterfly effect thing, it’s kind of annoying isn’t it?

Madonna has recorded a cover of it

Are you thinking of this DJ?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Madonna

My first ever stereo that had a shuffle function constantly picked tracks 1, 4, and 7 first. So according to me those are the best songs on many techno albums and compilations made between 1992-1999, I think

That Midori Takada album was 'famously' supposedly given a massive boost by youtube recommendations. Two million plays for what was a really quite obscure ambient percussion record. Subsequent very successful resissue along with other related records.

Andrés 'New For U' was kind of congruent with stuff I would have been browsing at the time but it was genuinely first in recommendations on Discogs an awful lot it seemed.

this happened with Clairo's "Pretty Girl" and launched her career

poll: glitch / broken rng VS. payola

This meant that no matter what I did, I always woke up to '96 Tears' by ? And The Mysterions. It was like Groundhog day. I gave up on the script.

this sounds pretty ideal tbh

just tbc it’s fair to point out that andres “new for u” does show up a lot on discogs recommendations for a lot of people

but it organically was a hit record before that, not the other way around

this "96 tears" thing would be a great fakeout opening montage for a movie, someone waking up each day to that same opening burst of organ, you assume time is repeating and then gradually you discover the joyous truth that this wonderful song is alphabetically first in both title and artist, and our protag is a struggling young linux programmer.........could be great. and either way you'd get to hear "96 tears" a lot.

:D

this is a great idea for a thread!

Our car does this — whenever it connects via Bluetooth to my wife’s phone, it plays “Abandoned Castle of My Soul,” by the Gothic Archies (sometimes very loudly). This has made the song famously reviled in our household.

― 60... 90... 120 Minute IPA (morrisp), Wednesday, August 7, 2019 4:10 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

This could be a thread in itself. For me the song was "Adidas In Heat" by Adrian Belew. It was automatically downloaded to my iPhone because I had the album in iTunes years ago on my old computer. So fucking obnoxious.

it's always interesting (to me) when the same track keeps coming up on youtube, wondering how personalised it is to me or how wide a swathe of youtube viewership are getting the same recommendation. sometimes pretty unlikely things keep popping up and have millions of views, but I'm p old and out of touch and have no idea if the algorithm made them or if they were popular already

(or how much that actually translates into real world fame, like if I tell people I'm into whatever quite niche-seeming band the algorithm is giving me this week will everyone be like, "sure, I know them", or rolling their eyes at my corny youtube-fed picks, or will they just look at me with the look I'd expect to get if I suddenly decided to talk to regular folks about, say, Belarusian tape-label coldwave - youtube sure does want me and apparently 1.2 million other people to listen to a band called Molchat Doma, which is quite often fine by me tbf)

for a while, if i hadn't switched it to "shuffle" mode, the iPod that I mostly keep for the car would automatically start playing Aaron Dilloway's "Tremors," which is pretty tame, but which is quite short...it would then transition into the second track off of Modern Jester, the high frequency and ultimately ear-testing "Eight Cut Scars (for Robert Turman)." Let's just say that I took that record off of the iPod at a certain point because my partner and i were tired of our ears getting pummeled on our way to work.

Lmao, I do love that Aaron Dilloway record but not "wanna hear it every time I start the car" levels of love

I must admit I find that the Youtube algorithms are eerily accurate at predicting what music I will enjoy.

OK, I misread this being a technological glitch that accidentally sounded cool, and thought of Subway Sect's Ambition, where Bernie Rhodes added a synth pattern that was out of time, and it sounds great, like something bubbling underneath

A-Punk by Vampire Weekend is what pops up alphabetically first for me when the car Bluetooth doesn’t sync correctly. It happens one out of every five or so times I get in.

In a reversal of "Plastic Love", YouTube recommending of the old Japanese TV show "Gachinko Fight Club" pushed the Dinosaur Jr deep cut "Over Your Shoulder" to hit status in Japan earlier this year: https://www.spin.com/2019/02/dinosaur-jr-japan-hit-youtube-algrorithm/

lol i'd forgot about that, what a great story

A recent episode of the podcast Reply All explained that youtube re-engineered its algorithm to prioritize total viewing duration (as opposed to just views), and to avoid repeating the most-popular content (i.e. to not keep suggesting gangnam style), leading to the sudden and kind of unexpected promotion of a lot of fringey content. That was in the context of conspiracy and far-right channels, but it maybe also explains the semi-arbitrary success of, say, So Inagawa, a low-profile minimal house producer from Japan. His tracks have up to 7.3 million plays whereas comparable tracks on the same label have around 1-13 thousand.

there was some song that was semi-known a decade or more ago solely b/c the artist credit was first on some list of song readily available to license for free on youtube videos or something like that?? don't remember the title or artist (presumably it started with 'a') so unfortunately i won't be able to recall exactly what the situation was. but i remember what it sounded like somewhat, at least at the very beginning. m83-ish semi-whispery/processed vocals but dancy/electronic and catchy

https://youtu.be.com/f9X1C7pTu-M

beach house's "space song", while not popular solely due to the quirks of the youtube algorithm, has seemingly become by far their most popular song because of it. though more recently a lot of the comments cite "replika" as their referrer which is some sort of AI chatbot thing??

Could it perhaps be the numerically-named 009 Sound System and their copyright-free trance anthem “Dreamscape”?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKfS5zVfGBc

whoops, xp

Barenaked Ladies have a song called "A" which I know the first few chords of very well

xp oh yeah i'm pretty sure that's the one dyl is talking about. been a while since i heard that but that beginning is instantly recognisable lol

Haha exactly the same experience as me xp to frogbs

Barenaked Ladies have a song called "One Week” which I know the first few two words of very well

i've noticed this on discogs as well. other records that inevitably get shown (in addition to "new for u" in house music searches):
soundstream, "live goes on
pepe bradock, burning
motor city drum ensemble, raw cuts #5/3

it is v curious.

yes champiness that was it!! also the song "with a spirit" by the same artist

I don’t think the Discogs algorithm is as mysterious as the YouTube algorithm - all those tracks are pretty popular anyway

apparently the 009 sound system thing was due to youtube's audioswap feature that started in 2007

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/009-sound-system-background-songs

thanks y'all for remembering :P

Ryo Fukui - Scenery

Ryo Fukui was an obscure Japanese jazz pianist until the algorithm gave his '76 album Scenery over 4 million views two years ago, now his album gets posted on r/jazz "more like this" threads so much it's a meme there

— curiosity killed the battery (@lowmediumhi) December 15, 2017

up to 8.5M views now

he got Takeuchi'd

y is iamiamwhoami's biggest hit on youtube because 35 million people typed 'y' into their search bars (expecting it to autocomplete to youtube.com) and got that song as their first google search result.

for the same reason, Liars's 30-second upload y (a pre-release snippet of the song 'Staring at Zero') has 8.7 million views. surprisingly, none of their actual songs have surpassed a million views.

wow, solid

LOL @ 1st comment on the Liars vid:

zion chan
7 months ago
anyone else here from just typing y trying to find youtube?
view 121 replies

Just came here to post that. Which came as a suggested article on my phone!

it's now on spotify

https://garbageday.substack.com/p/grieving-on-my-peloton

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-07-19/surf-curse-freaks-tik-tok

“Harness Your Hopes” appears on Spotify’s “Classic Punk” playlist; all the other tunes are decades older (needless to say, it doesn’t fit the theme). Pavement’s official Instagram posted a meme recently about the track’s ubiquity. It really is a weird thing.

this thread is amazing, btw

i have noticed recently that "never too much" by luther vandross pops up on a lot of the spotify playlists i like and i always play them on shuffle (NOT repeat all). it will always play "never too much" multiple times. especially if i need to pause — and then it almost always plays "never too much" next. it's his most played song on spotify by quite a lot. it was a top forty hit when it was released, so i'm not sure how much it factors into this discussion. i just thought it was weird.

The music has been sequenced for CD release in accordance with how the songs were recorded. So don't get your drawers crooked in your butt because songs are in a different order.

shit meant that for liner notes post.

this is a great thread either way. read it.

your drawers crooked in your butt

Pavement went ahead and made a "Harness Your Hopes" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2Ww_O3ceKU

Hey guys, I'm starting a Soulseek-proof band called 'My Documents and the MP3s'. Who's in?

not sure if this is going to lead to anything

this is what comes up rn if you google animal collective😭😭 not a joke. try it yourself pic.twitter.com/RRb60zYqnS

— jet’s key🪩✨ (@jetskitosway) June 3, 2023

boy i really dislike anco, but that is quite unfortunate.

(btw i was curious, so checked around and this seems to be exclusive to google)

Yes, you can see it in Google’s auto-suggestion when you just start typing the band name. Somehow the fact they’re both abbreviated as “AC” must have created a mucked-up mismatch.

who am i to argue with google

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-06/hiroshi-yoshimura-from-internet-obscurity-to-youtube-sensation/11366386

found a new one yesterday-
https://i.imgur.com/TAIsDoI.jpeg

(hope that image works. here's the direct link in case.)

band is mid-90s emo group
everyone asked about you + the song is "sometimes memory fails me sometimes" + i find its female vox + flute coda quite delightful. i don't do tiktok, so not sure what the context of the song's use was/is. very solid jam imo.

idk where this fits. i was recommended x-cetra in the similar artists section on the spotify profile for some modern bay area twee bands. here they are on discogs. i genuinely don't know what to make of this one. the backstory is pretty nebulous, too. seems like it's been "known" for a while but also has gotten numero's attention as of late. it's on spotify.

sorry for the redundancy. just kinda wild what shows up on there sometimes.

oh yeah, sorry i didn't say anything about the actual music--

ermmm... proto-vaporwave shaggs?

They appear to be children (or preteens at most) in that cover art…

they are.

(or were, at the time of recording)

i'm very confused by the whole thing. it's getting rym hype too.

the bio claims they all loved (among other things) fiona apple-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFeTGwi5Iow
x-cetra - 'wonderland' (2000)

That’s actually kinda cool & sophisticated, I can see why ppl are into it (I listened to a few more tracks). Dunno about the Shaggs comparison; seems like they can sing pretty well…

yeah some of the songs are... ehhhmm, kinda good? but like- was this meant to be heard? idk, just weird vibes. whoever did the music was into something else entirely.

Looks like his blog includes his radio show playlists (so you can see exactly what he’s into): http://kunstlertreu.blogspot.com/

(tantalizingly, it goes all the way back to 2002… which doesn’t quite get there)

oh weird, i was listening to this X-Cetra earlier and it was reminding me of something i couldn't put my finger on... i thought maybe some of the synth patches were presets i knew but i think it was because i used to have this Künstler Treu 12" from 2001:

https://www.discogs.com/release/178993-K%C3%BCnstler-Treu-Humuhumunukunuku-apuaa

it's kind of lightly-glitchy, woozy early-Mouse on Mars/Global Goon-ish electronic music with sampled easy-listening/hawaiian elements

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFymlAwuKXc

i wonder what the connection was...

kind of an angular way to take the thread's premise, but this thread always reminds me of the Monotones's "The Book of Love". Simply because that big percussive "thud" between "ba-doooooo" and "who wrote the book of love?" was itself an accident. it wasn't part of the song, but some kid was outside the garage they were practicing in, kicking a ball, and he managed to smack the ball into the garage at that exact moment of the song, and they heard it and loved it and decided to add it.

idk that the song becomes popular without that.

I've listened to the X-cetra a few times now (here's the full album)... I'm typically skeptical of this kind of thing, but I gotta admit this is the "real deal."

Someone should email the producer guy and ask how it came together, etc.

yeah, couple more listens+i really like a few songs. album is short, but gets better as it goes along. fascinating!

So, if I write a song called "how swift was my Taylor?" and become pka "the 1989”, well...

xxp

looks like Achim Treu submitted some of it for the WFMU 365 Days project way back in 2003...

https://wfmu.org/365/2003/233.shtml

X-Cetra - Conversation/Idiotic/Wasn't There

X-Cetra is a group of sparkely-eyed young girls (very young - aged 10 to 12 at the time of this recording) from Northern California. Actually they had dreamed of becoming a girl group. Unfortunately the music they were given to work with was supplied from the archives of their avantgarde-music-loving hippy papa Don Campau. They tried their best to make catchy pop tunes out of this material, but the end results remain rather bizarre nonetheless. Dark, strange passages made oddly endearing by the sweetness of the girls' voices and the youth of their lyrics. I'm afraid they're never going to hit the Top 40, but maybe the Top 40 of musical oddities.

- Achim Treu"

That's interesting; I wonder what "backing tracks by Achim Treu" means, if he didn't "supply" the music...

Here's Don's site, someone should shoot him an email:https://doncampau.com/

https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/x-cetra/stardust/

slioganach Jun 24 2020

i think the response that most of have upon learning about the existence of this album is generally something like "what in god's name is this and why does it sound like that?" i tend to fall into these kinds of rabbit holes pretty often, but they don't usually lead anywhere. this time, to my surprise, things turned out a bit differently.

the archive.org page which GenevieveGilliam links to unfortunately yields no answers about the strangeness of this title apart from one credit: the production responsibilities were apparently handled by someone named robin o'brien. i took it upon myself to trawl the web for musicians who went by this name and, after a bit of digging, was able to find someone whose profile fit the bill: lived in the right area, was around the appropriate age, had a background in music and was at least somewhat prominent in the local music scene. So I sent her an email.

to my surprise (and delight), she responded almost immediately and confirmed that she was in fact the person who produced the record! i explained that it's developed a bit of a cult following online and that people in certain pockets of the internet were simultaneously charmed and a little confused by it. i'm not going to provide any personal details as i feel that would be inappropriate, but here's what happened:

in 2000, ms. o'brien's daughters (ages nine and eleven) and two of their friends had begun to write songs and were interested in recording some of them. ms. o'brien is an experienced producer and, as such, decided to fulfill their wishes on her personal 4 track reel to reel. a friend of hers had coincidentally sent her a series of what she describes as trip-hop tracks, fully mixed, that she was free to do whatever she wanted with, and elected to use them as instrumentals. she said that she played with the tonality a bit and added some guitar work, but apart from that didn't put a ton of work into the project. the only quote from the email that i'll share word-for-word is her conclusion: "The girls gave their hearts to this guileless work. It was a joy to make."

so if you were listening to this thinking that it would have some kind of traumatic backstory, that some greedy man threw money at his children to make himself richer a la philosophy of the world, you were (thankfully!) wrong: in fact, the opposite seems to be the case. it's music written by children and realized by way of a particularly loving, creative parent.

That's a nice find, thx (funny how everyone keeps talking about the album sounding strange or bizarre... it really doesn't, to me at least)

yeah the shaggs is a bit of a misnomer, it's more like dam funk's "adolescent funk" or something like that. it's pretty sophisticated for some children with just a few flat notes and some shaggy dog melodies (the best bit imo).

i just think it's quite sweet and charming really. a bit like if the protagonists from PEN15 made an album for a school project (with their idm german exchange teacher)

i kind of want "matthew"-era kool keith to come do a guest verse on "idiotic" (panned hard-right)

xp Exactly - it's kind of remarkable they were so young; the lyrics & vox are fairly "accomplished."

(The 2000 date, and that CD-R cover, obv imbue it with a certain Y2K-nostalgia haze that makes for a great hook)

yeah that and especially the charlie's angels pose on their spotify artist photo is pretty period pitch-perfect

linee i was thinking, but didn't wanna say it out loud, "this sounds like dr dooom" on a couple of the beats!! that's where the confusion lies for me: one doesn't normally expect to hear earnestly harmonizing young girls accompanied by, at times, such menacing music.

and i mean, the polyrhythmic textures on the song i posted above are, like... uhh also not what i'd expect to hear on, well, most pop records tbh.

kudos for the info. i'll say it again: all music is folk music.

+re:shaggs comparison-
meant more like a descriptir of context, rather than sound: "obscure lofi girl group" and whatnot.

*descriptor

especially the charlie's angels pose on their spotify

Haha, I didn’t realize they had a Spotify profile (with pics and full bio)… after all this scouring of Discogs / YouTube comments, etc. The link to the Numero Group IG acct is promising

last week i got a paypal receipt for a payment to apple - i think for my monthly apple tv+ subscription - that contains this line:

Seller
Apple Services
http://itunes.com/bill

that url goes to a band from eastern europe called “bill” in the iTunes store, which i didn’t even think existed anymore

funny, i downloaded this from the 365 project back in 2004– hadn’t thought about it for years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6FVlmWaoQI

Katya Lel - Мой Мармеладный (Я Не Права)

that's a jam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2DLrhb-078

фрози - bounce (i just wanna dance)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1V68qgiLIo

Tanin Jazz - Virtual Love