The Mystery Of The 25 Year Old Rock Song Hitting The Top Of The Japanese Charts
Last week there was a lot of press around why a 25 year old Dinosaur Jr. song called “Over Your Shoulder” appeared out of the blue at #18 on the Japanese Billboard charts. As far as anyone could tell, there was no reason for this song to appear on any chart since it wasn’t part of a new release, let alone higher than the latest big hit by Arianna Grande.
Now it appears that the mystery is solved, and the quick rise up the charts can be all attributed to the 8 million plays on YouTube, but not in the way you might think.
“Over Your Shoulder” was actually used in a recurring segment of a Japanese show called GachinkoFight Club. The headscratcher here was that the show hasn’t aired in 15 years! The show was very popular when it was on, but it hadn’t been seen since, nor was it available on YouTube, at least legally. Streaming still isn’t big in Japan and there’s no Netflix or equivalent, so for all intense and purposes, the show was dead and forgotten.
What happened was that someone began to upload segments of the show to YouTube, which resulted in a mass of Japanese binge-watching, with “Over Your Shoulder” used as background music. Social media took over, with a flood of recommendations for the clips, which fueled the desire to watch the show even more.
But the person that uploaded the videos got cold feet about the illegal use of the content though, and suddenly deleted all the videos shortly after they were uploaded. As a result, there was no longer any evidence of the show on YouTube, and when music people went looking, there was no evidence of Dinosaur Jr either., which caused the mystery in the first place.
It should be noted that a few years ago Billboard changed the way their charts were derived, with a combination of sales, streams and social media in an effort to determine the true popularity of a song. It just goes to show that in this case, the algorithm worked only too well.
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