‘Baby Shark’ has officially swum into the Top 40 of the Billboard charts, so I guess it’s never going away.
It’s unlikely that you got through 2018 without hearing the infectiously catchy sound of ‘Baby Shark’.
It’s a nautical children’s nursery rhyme which takes listeners on a cross-generational journey of a shark family, starting with the youngest baby shark, to the parent sharks, and finally finishing with the oldest grandparent sharks.
The participatory song has been around for decades, but it was a 2016 video from South Korean-based education brand, Pinkfong, that saw the track reach the high status of Internet meme.
The Baby Shark Challenge took 2018 by storm, with participants dancing along to the song and posting their attempts on social media services such as TikTok – a big contributor to the song’s massive rise in popularity.
The song first went viral in Indonesia and fast became a global hit, becoming a Stateside success with its debut on the Kid Digital Song Sales chart in July and the Streaming Songs chart in November of last year.
This surge in popularity, and a helpful post-holiday freefall of 23 seasonal titles, from the Top 100 this week sees ‘Baby Shark’ come in at No. 32 on that chart.
Due to its original 2016 release date, ‘Babyshark’ was required to amass enough chart points in 2018 before it was even eligible to appear in the Billboard’s top 50, as stipulated in the chart rules regarding older songs.
Nielsen Music reported this week that the song has amassed 20.8 million streams – that’s paired with the 2.1 billion global views the Pinkfong music video holds, which leave it sitting pretty in Youtube’s list of 30 most-viewed clips in the platform’s history.
