Songs that became famous because of a system glitch

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

those are great

I have no ideas if it's a glitch but Cymande's Dove kept coming up on my recommendations or on the "up next" autoplay. I notice it's now up to nearly 10m views which seems a lot.

I spent a while hunting that down after hearing it in 25th Hour, only that's a remix they made for the soundtrack or something. Anyway, it's a great track, well done there youtube algorithm.

ah no sorry, I'm thinking of Bra, not Dove.

This got me to thinking about records that were banned, and whether that had an effect on the other records in the charts. e.g. when Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax" was banned, did an otherwise-obscure record became famous because Top of the Pops had to play number two instead? But "Relax" was concurrent with a bunch of big hits ("Radio Ga Ga", "99 Red Balloons", and "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" so no). Before The Modern Age of Internet Music there was a chain of people in between music and broadcast that would have picked up playlist errors, although I imagine that in the days when there were multiple versions of the same song (e.g. "La Macarena", and back in the 1960s when there were loads of simultaneous covers of pop standards) it would have been easy for an influential DJ to send the wrong version up the charts.

That led me to this 1984 article from The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jan/27/radio-1-relax-ban-john-peel-1984-archive

Which begins by talking about the ban on "Relax" and ends by pondering the future of John Peel, whose show was apparently hogging Radio One's quota of VHF stereo time. I learn that "Peel is a much loved institution and the names that [Controller of Radio 1, Derek] Chinnery vaguely puts forward as possible successors - Peter Powell and Janice Long - do not inspire confidence. If Radio 1 decide to do something about John Peel it clearly won't be for the right reasons."

I also learn from this interview that Peel wasn't too keen on Powell, real name Peter James Barnard-Powell:

"'Peter Powell was a dick, I'm afraid,' Peel says. 'It was Peter who came to me and told me that I shouldn't be playing hip-hop when I first started playing that because it was the music of black criminals.'"

A decade old, but

Previously best known as a BBC Radio 1 DJ and the husband (then ex-husband) of Anthea Turner, Peter Powell represents some of TV's biggest names including Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan, Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly.

Powell is executive chairman of the James Grant Media Group, whose management arm's clients also include Vernon Kay, Fearne Cotton, Holly Willoughby and Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/jul/14/mediatop100200853

Dunno what he's up to now, certainly still a prick though.

not quite what you're talking about, ashley, but your post reminded me of cheaply produced copycat cover records that ended up charting b/c consumers (presumably) found them to be eh-close-enough alternatives to the originals whose retail availability was often intentionally restricted by their labels in the hopes of juicing album sales. here's a few i know of in the united states...

- los del mar "macarena": spent fifteen weeks on the hot 100, peaking at no. 71. los del rio's original was not commercially restricted (in its original and bayside boys mix forms, it sold over 4 million units combined, and i guess the label knew most people were not gonna be suckered into buying a full-length album just for a dance craze record) so i guess this was more of a case of consumers being misled into buying the 'wrong' version due to the (intentional) similarity in artist billing.

- chucklebutt "tubthumping": six weeks on hot 100, no. 87 peak. standard configurations of chumbawamba's original had been sold in a hyper-restricted edition of just 70k copies, virtually all of which had sold out by the time it reached peak radio saturation. note again the misleading similarity in artist name.

- déjà vu "my heart will go on": seventeen weeks on hot 100, no. 58 peak. céline dion's original had been sold in an edition of 500k -- released at the height of its popularity, it sold out in just a few weeks. this one, a sterile-sounding dance mix, isn't quite a true 'copycat' version, as it was released by almighty records, a label that largely specialized in such mixes and often made it plain on the packaging that their releases were dance mixes.

in the itunes/digital download era, the same (tho less common) phenom of restricted single availability combined with the widespread availability of karaoke covers/'tributes' led to some of those covers actually charting:

- hit masters "all summer long": five weeks on hot 100, no. 19 peak -- actually higher than the no. 23 peak managed by kid rock's original on the strength of airplay only. kid rock had been withholding the entirety of his catalog from digital download stores in the u.s. in an effort to boost album sales: in the case of rock n roll jesus, which housed "all summer long," the tactic certainly succeeded, as the album ended up pushing ~3.5 million units, a big improvement compared to his previous lp.

- the rock heroes "all summer long": fifteen weeks on hot 100, no. 29 peak. broke later than the hit masters version, and in fact may not have been released or even recorded until it became clear via the hit masters version's performance that people were willing to buy a copycat version en masse. i remember it 'sounding' better than the hit masters version, which may go some distance to explain why it ultimately spent so much longer on the chart despite not achieving as high a peak.

- studio all-stars "american boy": three weeks on hot 100, no. 52 peak. estelle's original had enjoyed a pretty typical chart run for a breaking hit, with solid week-on-week gains in sales and airplay taking it just outside the top 10 before it suddenly crashed down to no. 37, then 57 and 53. those three weeks, the same weeks that studio all-stars' version charted, it had been yanked off itunes in an apparent effort to boost album sales. the effect of the stunt on sales of estelle's album shine was minor, which is probably why the label only stuck to it for three weeks. (in 2006, the same stunt had been pulled for two weeks with fergie's "glamorous," shortly before it became a number one hit. but at that time no karaoke cover charted during its digital absence.)

i think the charting karaoke cover thing happened quite a few times in the uk with hits that were being withheld from digital retail in hopes of a high chart debut, tho i didn't pay enough attention to have noticed many of them. i think a version of maroon 5's "payphone" may have been one?

ok yes, according to this nme article "payphone" was one of them. also apparently a cover of flo rida's "whistle" by a studio assemblage billed as 'can you blow my' (lol) was another

"- chucklebutt "tubthumping": six weeks on hot 100, no. 87 peak. standard configurations of chumbawamba's original had been sold in a hyper-restricted edition of just 70k copies, virtually all of which had sold out by the time it reached peak radio saturation. note again the misleading similarity in artist name."

Youtube has this, but I just can't click on it. I just can't do it. Google has a Billboard magazine article about it from 1998. It appears that the record label - Under the Cover Records - was set up specifically for this kind of thing, clones of underperforming quasi-novelty singles:
https://www.discogs.com/label/54079-Under-The-Cover-Records

They released "Lovefool" by the Casual Sweaters, "How Bizarre" by One-2-3, "Flagpole Sitta" by Hairy Canary, and "Walkin' on the Sun" by Smack. I imagine they're like those direct-to-videotape versions of classic fairytales made by the cheapest animators in South Korea.

There was a version of "What It's Like" by 'Everest' or something that I thought that label did, but it's not on the list.

LOL'ing @ the club version of "Butterfly Kisses" on that list. I'm sure that one's a banger that's guaranteed to fill up the floors.

They released "Lovefool" by the Casual Sweaters, "How Bizarre" by One-2-3, "Flagpole Sitta" by Hairy Canary, and "Walkin' on the Sun" by Smack. I imagine they're like those direct-to-videotape versions of classic fairytales made by the cheapest animators in South Korea.

― Ashley Pomeroy

i mean this was the k-tel model, right?

i love that the knockoff "smashmouth" is named "smack", though.

oh my god i had been wondering what the chucklebutt cover sounded like but last time i had checked it wasn't on youtube! lmfaooooo they even recreated the intro from the original's album version w/ the "i thought that music mattered" film dialog sample!!

apparently that under the cover records producer also did some dance covers around that time for robbins entertainment, a label that would later successfully release some of the biggest radio-friendly dance crossovers of the 2000s in the u.s. (dj sammy's "heaven," cascada's "everytime we touch," d.h.t.'s "listen to your heart"). bottom-feeding gone legit!

"Lovefool" by the Casual Sweaters, "How Bizarre" by One-2-3, "Flagpole Sitta" by Hairy Canary, and "Walkin' on the Sun" by Smack

Luv the “Casual Sweaters,” but the other mock artist names are disappointingly off the mark. Why not go all-in and tempt fate with names like “OMG,” “Harley Disaster,” and “Smush Mouse”?

ok, thanks to the whitburn obsessives i have heard smack's "walkin' on the sun". absolutely the laziest imaginable shit. reminds me of that youtube upload of "trilogie de la mort" with a generic reggaeton beat over the whole thing, and yes i just compared smashmouth to elaine radigue what are you going to do about it?

i have a fondness for some of those shitty knockoff records. some of the hendrix knockoff records are pretty great, for instance. and i am still really wanting to hear that "dirty dancing" knockoff cassette peter thomas did in the late '80s. it's probably terrible, but who really knows?

I have no ideas if it's a glitch but Cymande's Dove kept coming up on my recommendations or on the "up next" autoplay. I notice it's now up to nearly 10m views which seems a lot.

This is permanently lodged in my recommendations. Also, Tommy Guerrero - Road to Knowhere, Gabor Szabo - Dreams.

there have to be many songs that got this status by frequently being mistagged on napster/limewire/etc, not sure whether there is one exemplar though

oh how could i have forgotten this classic case of deliberate mistagging by a label to exploit flaws in the system: freak nasty (of "da' dip" fame) had his 2005 single release "do it just like a rockstar" retagged as "party like a rockstar" on digital download services by his label in 2007 to take advantage of the unavailability of shop boyz' breaking hit with that title, which was at that time only available to purchase as a ringtone. freak nasty's track thus spent three weeks on the hot 100 two years after it was released, rising as high as number 45 before promptly dropping entirely off the chart as soon as the shop boyz download became available.

it's still on itunes to this day under the revised title, tho the original title is visible on the cover artwork. since it well predated the shop boyz tune, it's obviously not a copy, and if you listen to it you'll notice the similarities are pretty slight (and nearly inevitable given that both tracks are such generic examples of party rap jams), with the first line of the refrain being similar in lyric and cadence to "party like a rockstar." (totally irrelevant to the matter at hand, but it also interpolates kid rock's "bawitdaba.")

so again, not so much a glitch in the system as much as an opportunistic attempt to subvert its limitations, but still pretty amusing/interesting in retrospect

didn't the band Zeigeist do this when The Knife's Silent Shout leaked, playing up on how similar the two bands sounded and putting their own "Tar Heart" as a track at the end of the album

I ended up on a bunch of early-2000s Boards of Canada bootlegs due to mistagging which may or may not have been deliberate

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