Lostwave is a term used to describe obscure music from an unknown source, with information, including title, artist, album and dates, being generally unknown or scarce.[1]
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Main article: The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet |
"The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet" was recorded by a teenager named Darius S. from a radio program that aired on the West German public radio station Norddeutscher Rundfunk.[2][3] The song was recorded to a cassette tape, which also included other songs by XTC and The Cure. To get a clean copy of the songs, the DJ chatter was removed, which is likely why the song's exact airplay date and title are unknown.[4]
The song was first posted to the internet between 2004 and 2007, but initially did not pick up much traction. In 2019, the search for the song's origins began to spread after Brazilian teenager Gabriel da Silva Vieira learned of it from Nicolás Zúñiga of Spanish independent record label Dead Wax Records. He uploaded the excerpt of the song to YouTube and several music-related Reddit communities, eventually founding r/TheMysteriousSong.[5]
On 27 May 2019, Australian music news website Tone Deaf wrote the earliest article focusing on the song, with author Tyler Jenke discussing the preliminary stages of the search and noting its similarities to the 2013 search for a song ultimately identified as "On the Roof" by Swedish musician Johan Lindell.[6][7]
Also in 2019, DJ Paul Baskerville was thought to be related to the song, as his program Musik für junge Leute ("music for young people") was thought to have been the show from which the song was taped.[8][9][10] He suspects that it was a demo recording that was played once by an NDR presenter and then discarded.[11]
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Main article: Everyone Knows That (Ulterior Motives) |
In 2021, WatZatSong user carl92 uploaded a 17 second snippet of a song that was recorded between 1982 and 1999; they found the recording amongst files in a DVD backup, and speculates it was a leftover from when they were learning to record audio. They claimed that the snippet was from 1999 and was from Spain, where they claimed to live.[12][13][14]
The search for the song was initially slow to gain traction, but gained a dedicated following over time[14] and spread to Reddit and TikTok. A subreddit dedicated to finding the song was created, with two of its members being interviewed by French commercial TV network TF1 on 7 January 2024.[15] Possible theorized sources for the song include a 1990s MTV broadcast, a piece of production music, or a commercial jingle.[16]
"On the Roof" is a song by Swedish musician Johan Lindell which, under the name Stay (The Second Time Around), went unidentified until 2013, when it was identified as being by Lindell by a listener of the Swedish radio station PP3, who played the song in hopes others would recognize it. Lindell had since abandoned music to pursue a career in painting, and was unaware of the search.[15][17]
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Main article: Panchiko |
In 2016, a 4chan user asked for help identifying a demo EP which he had found in a Oxfam shop in Britain. Despite the band name, album name, and cover art being visible, the band members, Owain, Andy, Shaun, and John, were identified only by their first names and there was no information about them online. In 2020, they were identified by using metadata from the price sticker to geolocate the charity shop to Sherwood, Nottingham and contacting Facebook users in the Sherwood area who shared first names with the band members.[18] The band has since reunited and gone on multiple international tours, as well as made a debut album.[19]
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Main article: Ready 'n' Steady |
"Ready 'n' Steady" is a song by American musicians Dennis Lucchesi and Jim Franks, credited as D.A, which was recorded in 1979. Despite never being publicly or commercially released, the song debuted on the Billboard's Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart at number 106, rising to number 102 before disappearing from the chart.[20] To date, the song is the only song without an official release appearing on a Billboard chart. The song's existence was in question for many years,[21] but was confirmed to be real in 2016. It was aired on KFAI in Minneapolis, Minnesota, US, that same year and is the only known instance of it being aired on radio.[22]