Music & viral songs

A dance scene from the Indian film Donga, given English subtitles that phonetically approximate what the Telugu lyrics sound like to an English speaker. One of the best-known examples of a whole late-2000s subtitling genre. The record's entry for a format the internet has largely stopped defending.

A bubblegum dance track performed by a green animated bear, dubbed into dozens of languages and left playing on autoplay in front of small children for the better part of two decades. The first song by a German independent artist to pass a billion views, now over 3.7 billion. The record's entry for a view count nobody was watching accumulate.

Hundreds of prisoners at a detention centre in Cebu performing Michael Jackson's Thriller in the exercise yard, filmed from a balcony. In January 2010 it was among the ten most popular videos on YouTube, with over 20 million views. The record's entry for the mass-choreography video as a genre.

An a cappella group's arrangement of the carol that keeps derailing into other songs. Went viral in 2007 and led directly to the group being signed by Atlantic Records. The record's entry for a video that gets exhumed every December by people who forget they did it last year.

A video in which a group mimes a song in one continuous take, usually with the camera walking through a building and the microphone passing from hand to hand. Named by Jake Lodwick on 14 December 2006; his Flagpole Sitta office lip dub followed in April 2007 and was covered by The Washington Post.

A break-dancing sequence from a 1990 Tamil film, performed by the short-statured actor known as King Kong to a remix of Madonna's Holiday by MC Miker G and DJ Sven. Circulated on early video sites entirely without its film, its title or its performer's name attached.

A band whose videos are engineering problems solved on camera: treadmill choreography in 'Here It Goes Again', a warehouse-sized Rube Goldberg machine in 'This Too Shall Pass', a one-shot routine with more than a dozen trained dogs in 'White Knuckles'. Each one goes viral within days. The record's entry for a band that became a format.

A 1998 Daler Mehndi song whose video green-screens four copies of the singer over computer-generated landscapes. He made it that way deliberately, after critics said his music was only popular because his videos featured dancing women. The internet took it as an accident and passed it round for a decade.

An animated frog dubbed over the Beverly Hills Cop theme, sold relentlessly as a mobile ringtone and pushed to number one in the UK and across Europe in 2005. Attention returned in 2016, by which point it was a joke about 2005. The record's entry for a ringtone with a chart career.

A rock arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon in D written by JerryC, which became famous through a cover by a masked bedroom guitarist known as funtwo and then through hundreds of others. The record's entry for the first great YouTube guitar duel, fought entirely by people facing a webcam alone.

A Panamanian track built on a vocal that mostly is not words. It went round the early internet through a YTMND page called Ualuealuealeuale, created in late 2005, where the looping nonsense and the video's flat strangeness did the rest. The record's entry for a song famous for being unintelligible.

Two Israeli film students lip-syncing to the Pixies' 'Hey' in a bedroom in Ramle on 24 August 2005, filmed during a sleepover as a birthday present for one of their boyfriends. It escaped, as things did then. The record's entry for a video that was never meant to leave the room.

A Norwegian band who play covers on kitchen appliances, hitting chest freezers and cookers with tools while singing in earnest. A clip of them performing went round the early video web, and in 2005 Ford put them on a coast-to-coast American tour as a viral campaign for the Fusion. The record's entry for a band that was a marketing budget's idea of an internet joke.

Two teenagers lip-syncing the English Pokémon theme in a bedroom. It became the most viewed video on YouTube at the time before being removed, and the pair's success put them in Time's Person of the Year: You issue, published 13 December 2006.

Existing songs remixed to a higher pitch, usually with a faster beat, almost always by fans rather than rights holders. Introduced in 2002 as a trance subgenre and spread across the internet from mid-2005. The record's entry for the edit that eventually became the default way audio travels.

Fan-made videos that re-cut footage from anime out of its original order, lay a full song over it and lip-sync characters to the lyrics. A staple of convention screening rooms long before video sites existed, and by 2003 the method had spread to video-game and Western-animation footage as well.