The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet is an ongoing internet search. It involves many internet users from around the world trying to find out the artist and the title of a new wave song that played on a German radio station in 1984.^[1]

Background

A Rolling Stone article in September 2019 says that a man named "Darius S." recorded the song from a radio program called Musik für junge Leute ("Music for Young People") he listened to on the German public radio station NDR, probably in 1984.^[1]

Darius says he recorded the song on a tape labeled "cassette 4", along with songs from XTC and The Cure that were released in around 1984. Further evidence shows that the Technics tape deck that he used to record the song on was also made in 1984.^[1]

In 2007, Darius' sister, posting under the fake name "Anton," posted the song on the internet to try to find out the artist and the title of the song.^[2] The woman, who identified herself as "Lydia H.", posted part of the song to a German fan website devoted to eighties synth-pop and to spiritofradio.ca, a Canadian website that helps to identify songs uploaded by fans.^[1]

Viral internet phenomenon

The mystery of the unidentified song became very popular in 2019 when a Brazilian teenager named Gabriel da Silva Vieira started to look for evidence of its origin. He uploaded a clip of the song to YouTube, and to several Reddit groups.^[1]

On July 9, 2019, YouTuber Justin Whang released an episode of his video series Tales from the Internet. The episode talks about the progress of the search up to then. When the video was released, more internet users have tried to help to identify the song.

After the video came out, some progress was made. The whole song was found and posted by a Reddit user in July 2019. Furthermore, people who might have known the song were contacted. This includes people such as Paul Baskerville, who was the DJ of the show from which the song was likely recorded. He has said he does not remember the song.^[1] The Discord community of the search has also found other undocumented and/or obscure media of various genres.