song

The acoustic slot in a Taylor Swift show where she plays a song not on the setlist — the surprise song — a Reputation-tour habit from 2018 that the Eras Tour of 2023–24 turned into a nightly internet event, with tracking spreadsheets, predictions, and a genre of tweet reading 'she played WHAT in Kansas City'. The record notes the tour ended on 8 December 2024 and the spreadsheet is still maintained.

Hollow Knight: Silksong, announced in 2019 and then silent for so long that the waiting became its own meme — every Nintendo Direct a fresh betrayal, every fan a 'Silksong is real' believer. Released in September 2025, at which point the joke died and the game began.

'Lighter', by Jelly Roll and Carín León, produced by Cirkut, the first single from the official 2026 FIFA World Cup album. A country singer and a Mexican regional star on one tournament anthem, and the internet's month-long argument about whether a World Cup song is supposed to sound like that. The record's entry for the official soundtrack of a three-country tournament.

A recording in which one artist's cloned voice is layered onto another artist's song: Kanye West singing an emo ballad, Freddie Mercury singing a pop hit, a cartoon character doing a rap verse. Built on free voice-conversion tools in 2023, it was the year's dominant AI music format, both a joke genre and a legal headache. The record's entry for the voice as an instrument anyone could pick up.

A new wave song recorded off German radio in 1984, believed to be by a European band, with no known title and no known artist. The search for its origins took hold in 2019 after a Brazilian Reddit user asked whether anyone recognised it, and has continued as a distributed research project ever since.

A pop song pitched up and sped up by a quarter so it fits a fifteen-second clip and sounds like a chipmunk in a hurry — the sped-up song — as the TikTok format of 2021 that descended from nightcore, revived Lady Gaga's 'Bloody Mary' and Raye's 'Escapism', and by 2022 had labels releasing official sped-up versions of their own singles. The record's entry for the remix that is a setting.

A children's song about a duck who walks up to a lemonade stand and asks, repeatedly, for grapes. Written by Bryant Oden with animation by forrestfire101, it took nearly 90 million views within three years and ran to a fifth part before finishing in October 2024. The record's entry for a joke told to the same rhythm fifteen times.

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.