How TV Pirates Accidentally Pushed a 25-Year-Old Indie Song to the Top of the Charts in Japan

Last week, an alt-rock mystery puzzled the music press. Almost 25 years after its release, the Dinosaur Jr. song "Over Your Shoulder" appeared at number 18 on Japan's Hot 100 chart, beating out major new releases like Ariana Grande's "7 Rings." Here's what drove the popularity of the old song: More than 15 years ago, it was used on a Japanese reality show about boxing bad boys. Six years ago, Billboard started counting YouTube plays. And just days ago, YouTube apparently began recommending pirated episodes of that reality show to Japanese users, who seemingly binged it in the thousands, playing "Over Your Shoulder" over and over again in the process.

Or perhaps modern pop music just sucks ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

NBT.

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[sound+vision]

After listening to the Dinosaur Jr. track, I couldn't call it either "modern" or "pop". It's in the general vein of 90s alt-rock, which is a space that I dig, but this particular track Over Your Shoulder is pretty boring. If I'm picking obscure B-sides from that era I'd rather go to something from the Pixies, Modest Mouse, Toadies, the Flaming Lips, etc...

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[sound+vision]

You're right, I must not be old or young or cool enough to like Dinosaur Jr. I'll try-harder next time, maybe some day I can post a momentously blank non-opinion like yours. Thanks for the great advice!

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[Cipheron]

There's nothing weird or Japanese-culture-specific in this story however.

The videos popped up in Japanese Youtube's recommendations due to an automartic algorithm. As more people watched it - purely because of the recommendations system - positive feedback exposed it to more and more people via the algorithm, driving views, but also *autoplay* views. Next, another algorithm counted those views and added them to the music charts rating for that song.

Maybe the reason is that these algorithms were design for i

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[ArchieBunker]

Agreed. I now have a job dealing with Linux directly. For some reason they picked Ubuntu because it's what everybody runs. So far my job has been try running all the old software on Ubuntu 18.04 and seeing what broke. What is the deal with that systemd network wait service? If one interface doesn't have an ethernet link it causes a two minute delay in booting. Also found out that was causing sshd to be delayed for several minutes. No warnings or errors. Just systemd saying sshd died and trying to restart th

Stupid chart

[Ecuador]

So this Japanese Top-100 chart decided to include YouTube a few years ago. But the way they implemented it, it does not count any "official" channels, just it looks for what is called "International Standard Recording Code" on any video, which means if you embed a song somewhere in your video and your video goes viral, the song appears on the Top-100, regardless of how you used it / what percentage of your video the song accounts for.
Quite silly process really, but it is mostly harmless, I mean some weird t

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[Iconoclysm]

Japan has a very different culture from what we are used to in the US. They definitely act with more uniformity but no, they don't do what they're told so much as move as a unit. In Japan, industries throw everything at the wall to see what sticks, not focus on one thing.

Show me The Way

[QuietLagoon]

I like their cover of that Frampton song.... ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] )

This happens a lot in Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the more famous exmaple's is Electric Light Orchestra's Twilight, which was featured in an anime short film in the 1980s.

So the charts mean nothing?

[viperidaenz]

They're counting plays when the song happens to be in a random YouTube video?
But they only count a subset of all the songs? Otherwise there would be TV theme songs in the charts too. and random songs played in some kids youtube channel.

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[petermgreen]

Presumably for a song to be counted it has to actually be identified. I would guess that youtube is using the same or a similar content ID system for these charts as the one they use to redirect advertising royalties.

Most legit youtubers with large followings are careful to avoid anything that will hit a youtube content ID match because a content-id means at best losing the ad-revenue for the video and possibly strikes against the channel. For TV theme songs if the copyright holder of a TV show cares enough

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[sysrammer]

...a semi-obscure British band from the 60s...

Oh come on now, The Beatles weren't *that* obscure. Had a few hits.

Kinda like Plastic Love

[dannycim]

Reminds me of Plastic Love: http://www.openculture.com/201... [openculture.com]

Because

[ThurstonMoore]

Dinosaur Jr is fucking awesome!

Hard of hearing Japanese

[WindowsStar]

There must be a lot of hard of hearing Japanese. Wow chalk that up to worst song ever or should I say chart that down to worst song ever.

Copyright infringement is not piracy.

[xororand]

I doubt anyone actually pirated the TV show.
It's far more likely they merely copied it without authorization, i.e. they committed copyright infringement.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy... [gnu.org]

art forever

[globaljustin]

Six years ago, Billboard started counting YouTube plays

Interesting. Sure we can surmise they are just looking to boost Billboards own conglomerate usage stats, but it seems like in this case a rising tide raises all boats.

I'm happy to see artists getting credit for things like this. Somewhere, sometime, someone in Japan thought their song was good and used it in their art. That deserves recognition if technically possible.