INQUISITR.COM / Entertainment

‘Baby Shark’ Tops Charts, But No One Owns Rights To It

By Trisha Faulkner
Published on: 19:59 PST, Jan 25, 2019

“Baby Shark” is a catchy and bizarre children’s tune that anyone who spends time around a toddler will know by heart.

As the Inquisitr previously reported, “Baby Shark” isn’t a new melody that quickly picked up steam and went viral. The original children’s music video was published on YouTube back in 2015 before being revamped a year later.

It wasn’t until several years — after the revamped video was published — that it started to attract attention and eventually went viral. With more than 2.5 billion views, just shy of 10,000 comments, and more than 5.1 million likes on the original YouTube video, most assume that someone – presumably Pinkfong – is making some serious bank and pulling in a lot of cash from this viral sensation.

After all, the catchy tune did land on the Billboard Hot 100.

According to the Rolling Stone, however, that is not the case. It turns out no one owns the rights to “Baby Shark,” and no one is really sure where the song came from.

The catchy tune first hit YouTube in 2015 when a South Korean educational band named Pinkfong uploaded it. The band ended up remixing the song with a new beat and melody before uploading a new version in 2016.

This new version from 2016 is the video that has gone viral.

The original “Baby Shark” has since been adapted into hundreds of different versions in nearly a dozen different languages, making it even more difficult to pinpoint the song’s origin.

Rolling Stone goes on to report several different parties are currently arguing in court over copyright disputes, in an effort to determine who owns the song and who will be credited for its creation.

Johnny Only, for example, uploaded a version of the song on his YouTube channel back in 2011, before later complaining that the latest version Pinkfong released was way too similar to his own.

Pinkfong, however, claims they acquired the song from an old nursery rhyme and didn’t take inspiration from any other artist.

Moreover, there is also a German dance version of “Baby Shark” that gained a lot of attention back in 2007. Speaking to Vulture, the composer of the song, “Kleiner Hai,” revealed she had been singing the German version for just shy of two decades but had no idea where it came from.

“It’s a popular children’s song in Germany. We never found out where it came from. We checked the rights and it was public law, like a Christmas song, so there were no royalties,” she explained during the interview.

Rolling Stone goes on to note the origins of “Baby Shark” are just as mysterious as — if not more so than — the origins of the equally familiar tune “Happy Birthday.”

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