How a catchy tune became the soundtrack to TikTok's silliest videos

Turn to TikTok for some amusement, and you’ll find short videos of a fluffy cat cuddling a fluffy dog, a toddler clutching a bag of Doritos as though it were a teddy bear, or a penguin creating flipper-print artwork.

You’ll have to turn up the volume to hear what all these posts have in common: a song created ten years ago called “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” by Kevin MacLeod.

Although few people know the name of the song or the person who composed it, over the past decade, it’s served as the background music for millions of TikToks and has been played billions of times. It’s also all over Instagram and YouTube.

The song's story illustrates one of the core ways that music and social media have shaped each other over the last decade—with the proliferation of viral, loopable songs that immediately telegraph a video’s mood on digital platforms designed for ease of copying sound from video to video.

The man behind the monkeys

Kevin MacLeod is a prolific composer who got his start as a computer programmer. He created songs for fun on his computer and in front of audiences at improv comedy shows.

MacLeod’s compositions are what’s known as “library music,” stockpiles of songs that content creators draw upon to score their works. These are the sort of melodies that you would never queue up on Spotify but end up in the background of all sorts of things: video games, films, and countless short videos.

“Usually, I'll be like watching a YouTube video and the music sucks,” says MacLeod. “And I'm like, well, let me try to do something better.”

And once he tries his hand at something better, he releases it for free.

In the early days of his career, MacLeod would craft his own licenses — not to protect his rights, but to give them away. MacLeod says his approach was to “find a license, and then do everything the opposite,” adding clauses like “you have the right to use this for your personal things. You have the right to use this commercially. You can sell this thing in another product if you want to.”

Then Creative Commons came along, standardizing royalty-free rights. While some composers and industry people argue that such sharing undermines composers’ ability to make a living, MacLeod says he just wants his work out in the world.

“I just want my stuff to be heard,” explains MacLeod. “You know, you gotta make it as easy as possible.”

Soundtracks spread with two taps of a finger

In the early days of YouTube, users posted pretty much anything regardless of copyright, says Bondy Kaye, a researcher at the University of Leeds and cofounder of the TikTok Cultures Research Network.

But with crackdowns by digital fingerprinting programs like Content ID, Kaye says people increasingly turned to royalty-free songs, including “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys.”

“And then you just follow that train as it goes all the way to TikTok,” says Kaye.

Kaye says that while YouTube lets users upload new videos, TikTok makes it easier to create videos that build off existing content with features that allow users to splice a reaction video alongside the original, take a short clip from it, or reuse the music. (Instagram also contains a similar feature.)

“So if you happen to see a viral video, with just two taps of your finger, you can create and publish a new video using that same song.”

As more people saw TikToks with “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys,” more people made TikToks with “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys,” too.

Something magical about “Monkeys”

TikTok said they couldn’t provide us with all-time numbers, but rankings by industry watchers over the last few years routinely show “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” among the most used songs on the platform. MacLeod says that out of his 2,000 compositions, “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” accounts for half of all listens.

Even with the Creative Commons license, he’s still earned over seven figures—mostly from other countries that don’t always follow the same payment protocol.

So is “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” just a song in the right place, with the right permissions, at the right time? Or is there something special about it that makes it such an appealing soundtrack for our favorite silly, joyful highlights?

“The answer is both,” jokes Paula Harper, a musicologist at the University of Chicago who writes about sound and the internet.

Harper says “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” subtly uses some classic musical references, like its booming bass line.

“You can find examples going back to the 18th century where composers like Mozart are using boom, boom, boom, boom,” says Harper, mimicking the bouncing bass line, “to signify this is goofy, this is silly, this is comic relief.” For example, she points to the first aria in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, “Notte e Giorno Faticar,” when a similar baseline introduces Leporello as “the goofy comic-relief servant character.”

Then there's a melody “that is definitely evocative of something like a calliope, like a carousel,” says Harper. A good example, she says, is the circus march “Barnum and Bailey’s Favorite,” which shares the same basic structure of a light melody on top of an alternating bass line.

When “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” comes on, Harper says people probably are not consciously thinking about old-timey circuses, and they're definitely not thinking about Mozart. But together, the song plays on associations we already have to evoke a mood immediately.

Composer Kevin MacLeod acknowledges that “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” is musically unexceptional. “I mean, the mix isn't particularly great. The instruments aren't particularly great…. There's nothing sonically interesting about it,” admits MacLeod.

But it pulls together these musical ideas in a way that lets you know what’s happening, and with – he thinks – a bit of subtlety.

“It's not assaulting you with comedy. You know, there's not slide whistles and train horns and cars honking,” laughs MacLeod. “People like it. People use it. And it does the thing.”

That “thing” has gone from platform to platform, cat video to cat video. And no matter what happens to TikTok, the sound of “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” will likely be stuck in our heads for years to come.

Copyright 2024 NPR