What was the first song that went “viral”?

It’s not only social media platforms sending songs viral, though. Thanks to the advent of streaming platforms, songs are going viral via the confluence of online video and audio content. In recent months, we’ve seen both Sophie Ellis-Bexter’s ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ and Natasha Bedingfield’s ‘Unwritten’ go straight from film soundtracks to the top 20 in Spotify’s Global playlist. Those two largely forgotten pop songs from the early noughties could make such a remarkable comeback, opening up whole new possibilities for marketers.

That’s before we even get onto TikTok songs or trending songs that made it big on Instagram reels. These tracks are often here today, gone tomorrow. Who still remembers Drake’s ‘In My Feelings’, for example? The song formed the basis of a viral video fad but not much else.

But which viral hit came first? What was the song that originated “trending” music that made “going viral” a thing?

How many views is viral?

K-pop star Psy arguably set the benchmark for how many views a song’s music video needs to go viral. Back in 2012, long before the age of TikTok music or trending Instagram reels, his song ‘Gangnam Style’ became the first video to achieve a billion YouTube views. Since then, the billion mark on YouTube has been the one to reach for any wannabe viral song.

The history of viral music has another video to thank for popularizing the phenomenon, however. Between 2006 and 2007, Rick Astley’s number one hit from two decades earlier, ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, embedded itself in public consciousness in a manner never seen before. The act of Rickrolling, in which the song’s video opened when an unsuspecting victim clicked on a link they assumed to be something else, sent her views into the stratosphere.

Yet Rickrolling wasn’t really about the song. It was about the joke – an internet meme mostly for the fun of it and at least partially lampooning the music. How many people have been Rickrolled and got to the end of the song’s video? As if to prove this point, dozens of sites have since sprung up claiming, genuinely or otherwise, to be a “Rickroll link generator”.

‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ arguably wasn’t even the first song to become a viral sensation through YouTube. OK Go’s ingenious treadmill-hopping video for ‘Here It Goes Again’ turned an otherwise agreeable indie-popper into one of 2006’s most-heard things online.

Fast-forwarding a few years, the Pharrell Williams hit ‘Happy’ spawned thousands of dance videos around the world imitating the original. At that stage, Instagram was just a platform for sharing still photos. Meanwhile, other participation-based internet dance memes like the ‘Harlem Shake’ just sampled fractions of songs that never really achieved success in their own right.

But what is considered viral music?

A definition of viral songs that only consider YouTube, Instagram, TikTok views, or Spotify’s current global playlist is overly restrictive. For a start, the age of phone ringtones regrettably treated us to a worldwide chart-topping remix of ‘Axel F’ by Crazy Frog. That was from a ringtone company’s TV advert going viral.

So, when we talk about viral songs, we also have to talk about those that make it to the top of the charts. Returning to the 1980s, another track which achieved chart success has a very strong claim to the title of the first viral song. Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ revolutionized the music industry, with its cinematic music video arguably bringing MTV to a mass audience.

Its status as a viral song was cemented when a scene from the influential film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off borrowed its dance choreography. Decades later, a video showing the inmates of a Filipino prison dancing to the song also went viral, and a geriatric version of the dance routine spread across the internet in 2019.

‘Thriller’ was probably the first viral music video, then. However, we can point to examples of songs going viral even before the arrival of MTV. The Beatles song ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ propelled a completely unknown band in the United States not only to the top of the charts but to a decade of world domination. It heralded the start of the British Invasion, as groups like The Animals, The Kinks and The Rolling Stones topped the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart during the two years that followed.

Going further back to 1955, Chuck Berry’s breakout hit ‘Maybellene’ sold over a million copies. It topped the Billboard R&B chart and reached number five on its list of overall best sellers. A Black guitarist having this level of crossover success was unheard of at the time. As the song’s producer, Leonard Chess, put it, “It was the trend, and we jumped on it.”

The same year, a relatively unknown song released twelve months earlier with little traction suddenly took the pop charts by storm. ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and His Comets blew up after soundtracking the opening credits for the film Blackboard Jungle. The song, now credited with bringing rock and roll into the mainstream, was actually rock’s first viral success.

Did classical music go viral?

Was ‘Rock Around the Clock’ the first song to go viral, though? Not if you count Johann Strauss’ waltz ‘The Blue Danube’. This piece, now etched into the space-time continuum because of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odysseywas previously known for its extensive use in the soundtrack of the 1932 film Grand Hotel.

But the waltz had already gone viral before the era of cinema. In fact, it was already making waves around Europe after its performance at the 1867 World Exposition in Paris. ‘The Blue Danube’ is named after the river flowing through the Austrian capital, Vienna, an allusion to anti-Prussian sentiment that impressed the French monarchy of the time. By the 20th Century, the piece had become such a part of popular consciousness that it was known as the “unofficial anthem” of Austria.

Yet not even Strauss could compete with just how viral one of his Romantic-era forefathers became. In December 1841, two years into a tour of Europe, Franz Liszt arrived in Berlin. He was already renowned as a brilliantly accomplished pianist in musician circles, but things were about to get wild. Liszt performed pieces typical of his repertoire by him at the time, culminating in an extraordinarily complex arrangement of the ‘William Tell Overture’.

His shows had garnered a lukewarm reception in other parts of Europe up to that point. Berlin was a different story. The crowd went delirious at Liszt’s performance, meaning the start of a phenomenon known ever since as Lisztomania.

Who composed the ‘William Tell Overture’?

And so, perhaps we can call the ‘William Tell Overture’ the first song that went “viral”, thanks to Liszt’s piano version of it in the 1840s. The song is now among the most popular classical music pieces and has featured prominently in various cultural media during the last hundred years. You can find it used anywhere from The Lone Ranger and Looney Tunes to Apple adverts and (fittingly) the film Everything Everywhere All at Once.

While Liszt may have been responsible for its popular appeal, the original ‘William Tell Overture’ wasn’t actually composed by the Hungarian. Gioachino Rossini was his composer, writing the piece as the introduction of the otherwise undistinguished opera William Tell. Rossini virtually retired after completing what would be his last opera. He’d likely be amazed at the enduring appeal of its overture today.

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