List of viral music videos

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

This is a partial list of viral music videos, that gained rapid attention on the Internet. Like Internet memes, viewership of such videos tend to grow rapidly and become more widespread because the instant communication facilitates word of mouth.

This list documents music videos known to have become viral; other viral videos can be found at list of viral videos with additional videos that have become Internet phenomena for other categories can be found at list of Internet phenomena.

Major music videos

These videos are official music videos from various artists that have gained viral popularity after their release.

Psy's "Gangnam Style" video has been the most-watched video on YouTube as of November 2012.

• "Ai Se Eu Te Pego" - A Brazilian song made popular by the Brazilian singer Michel Teló during the height of the Música sertaneja craze and the international success of the song with main release getting more than 700 million views.
• "Crank That (Soulja Boy)" - Debut single by American rapper Soulja Boy Tellem and is accompanied by the "Soulja Boy dance". The song is recognized by its looping steelpan riff.
• "Gangnam Style" – A song and music video by South Korean rapper, Psy, showing him doing an "invisible horse dance" and saying the catchphrase "Oppan Gangnam Style" across a number of odd locations, leading to its viral spread as well as the single's reaching international music charts. The video has since become the most watched video on YouTube as of April 2016.
• "Hello" – Adele's song released in October 2015 was a major digital commercial success being the first song to sell 1 million units within a week of its release. Its video, which primarily features Adele's singing her song through a telephone conversation, led to numerous mashups with other songs, including Lionel Richie's song of the same name which had a similar theme to its video. Further, as of April 2016, the video holds the record for the fastest time to reach one billion views on YouTube, reaching this within 88 days of release.
• "Hotline Bling" – A song and video by Drake released in October 2015; the video primarily consists of Drake dancing with female performers against brightly-lit backgrounds. Drake's dance style was considered "goofy" and like that "of a total fool", leading to Internet users either resampling the video against other songs they felt more fitting, or themselves recreating the dance moves.
• "Lambada" - A song recorded by French pop group Kaoma. It features guest vocals by Brazilian vocalist Loalwa Braz. It was released as the first single from Kaoma's debut album Worldbeat. The video, filmed on Cocos beach in the city of Trancoso, in the state of Bahia, Brazil, features the Brazilian child duo Chico & Roberta. It was a big international hit in the summer of 1989 promoting Latin dance worldwide.
• "Macarena" - A Spanish dance song by Los del Río about a woman of the same name. Appearing on the 1993 album A mí me gusta, it was an international hit in 1995, 1996, and 1997, and continues to be a popular dance at weddings, parties, and sporting events. One of the most iconic examples of 1990s dance music, it was ranked the "#1 Greatest One-Hit Wonder of All Time" by VH1 in 2002. The song uses a type of clave rhythm. The song ranks at No. 7 on Billboard's All Time Top 100. It also ranks at No. 1 on Billboard's All Time Latin Songs. It is also Billboard's No. 1 dance song and one of six foreign language songs to hit No. 1 since 1955's rock era began.

Other music videos

Gary Brolsma, aka "The Numa Numa Guy"

• "Bed Intruder Song" – A remix by the Gregory Brothers of a televised news interview of Antoine Dodson, the brother of a victim of a home invasion and attempted assault. The music video became a mainstream success, reaching the Billboard Hot 100, and became the most watched YouTube video of 2010.
• "Canon Rock" – A rock arrangement of the Canon in D by JerryC which became famous when covered by funtwo and others.
• "Chinese Food" - A song and music video by Alison Gold recorded with the controversial ARK Music Factory, the same company behind Rebecca Black's viral song "Friday"
• "Chocolate Rain" – A song and music video written and performed by Tay Zonday (also known as Adam Nyerere Bahner). After being posted on YouTube on 22 April 2007, the song quickly became a popular viral video. By December 2009, the video had received over 40 million views.
• "Space Oddity" by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield - Performed and recorded during a space mission on Soyuz TMA-07M. The song is set in zero gravity against spectacular views of Earth with Hadfield singing and playing the guitar
• "Don't Drop That Thun Thun" - A song and viral video by The FiNATTiCZ making it to to #35 on the Billboard Hot 100
• "Friday" – A music video sung by 13-year-old Rebecca Black, partially funded by her mother, which received over 200 million views on YouTube and spread in popularity through social media services.
• "The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)" – A song and associated video by the Norwegian comedy duo Ylvis prepared for their television show. The song's verses note the noises other animals make, but in the chorus, ask what noise a fox makes, at which point the song offers nonsense phrases like "gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding!" and "fraka-kaka-kaka-kaka-kow!", while the video takes a similarly funny turn. The video saw over 43 million hits within a few weeks of its release, topping music charts, and leading to Ylvis being signed for more music by Warner Bros. Records.
• "Gwiyomi" – A K-pop single by the South Korean indie musician Hari. The song was released on 18 February 2013 and is based on an Internet meme known as the Gwiyomi Player, which was invented in October 2012 by the K-pop idol Jung Il Hoon and has inspired many similar versions uploaded onto the Internet by Asian netizens.
• "Juju on That Beat" - Viral video by two Detroit teenagers Zay Hilfigerrr and Zayion McCall, with their dance moves. The song charted on Billboard Hot 100 reaching number 11.
• "The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody" – A 2009 music video featuring The Muppets performing a modified version of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody". The video received over seven million hits within its first week of release on YouTube, and by 2012, it had earned over 25 million hits. The video won the "Viral Video" category in the 14th Annual Webby Awards.
• "Numa Numa" – Gary Brolsma lip-syncs the Romanian song "Dragostea din tei" by O-Zone. Released on December 6, 2004 on the website Newgrounds.com, it shows Brolsma lip-synching the hit song with lively gesticulations and dance moves.

File:Ok go - here it goes again.jpg

The band OK Go in their first viral video "Here It Goes Again".

• OK Go music videos – Several of the band's award-winning videos incorporate unique concepts, such as dancing on treadmills in "Here It Goes Again", a giant Rube Goldberg machine in "This Too Shall Pass", or a choreographed one-shot routine using over a dozen trained dogs in "White Knuckles". As such, they often go viral within a few days of their release. Their music video for "The Muppet Show Theme Song" won a Webby Award for "Viral Video" in 2012.
• "One Pound Fish" – A sales pitch song written and sung by Muhammad Shahid Nazir, a fish stall vendor in London, that became a viral hit and led to Nazir getting a recording contract.
• "Pants on the Ground" – First sung by "General" Larry Platt during the season 9 auditions of American Idol in Atlanta, Georgia, on 13 January 2010. Within one week, the video was seen by approximately 5 million on YouTube, had over 1 million fans on Facebook, and was repeated on television by Jimmy Fallon and Brett Favre.
• "Pop Culture" – A 2011 YouTube video of a live mash-up by the musician Hugo Pierre Leclercq aka "Madeon", aged 17 at the time, using a Novation touchpad to mix samples from 39 different songs. The video went viral within a few days of being posted, and led to Leclercq's fame in the electronica music genre.
• "Red Solo Cup" – Toby Keith's recording of a drinking song devoted to the Solo disposable cup became a viral hit, with the video logging over seven million views on YouTube and the song eventually becoming Keith's biggest hit on the Billboard Hot 100.
• "Twelve Days of Christmas" by a cappella group Straight No Chaser went viral in 2007 and led to the group being signed by Atlantic Records.
• "United Breaks Guitars" – A video by the band Sons of Maxwell, recounting how United Airlines broke a guitar belonging to band member Dave Carroll. The video reached 11 million views, was named one of the top ten of 2009, and created speculation that it had caused a $180 million drop in the airline's stock value.
• "Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)" - viral video by Silentó with own set of unique moves immitated by other fans. The song peaked at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

YouTube musicians from Lisa Lavie's online collaboration video "We Are the World 25 for Haiti (YouTube Edition)" met on the same stage for a live reunion performance ten months later in Washington, D.C.

• "We Are the World 25 for Haiti (YouTube Edition)" is a massively collaborative crowdsourced charity video, involving 57 geographically distributed unsigned or independent contributors, that was produced by Canadian singer-songwriter and YouTube personality Lisa Lavie to raise money for victims of 12 January 2010 Haiti earthquake. The video received repeated coverage on CNN, and the video's participants were collectively named ABC News "Persons of the Week" on U.S. national television by television journalist Diane Sawyer in March 2010.
• "What What (In the Butt)" – A viral music video set to a song about anal sex by gay recording artist Samwell. The video was posted on Valentine's Day 2007, and two weeks later had already been viewed 500,000 times. It was subsequently parodied on the South Park episode, "Canada on Strike", which poked fun at several other Internet memes and personalities.

Other music videos

These are videos generally set to music though are not official videos from the music's performer or artist, and often are mash-ups, remixes, or other such uses of existing music.

Ads and campaigns

• "Dumb Ways to Die" – A music video featuring "a variety of cute characters killing themselves in increasingly idiotic ways" that went viral through sharing and social media. It was part of a public service announcement advertisement campaign by Metro Trains in Melbourne, Australia to promote rail safety.
• Mandatory Fun album and the #8days8videos campaign – A viral marketing campaign by comedy singer/songwriter "Weird Al" Yankovic to promote his 2014 album Mandatory Fun by releasing eight videos for the new album over eight consecutive days across different streaming providers. The Internet-aided approach was considered very successful, leading to the album to become Yankovic's first number one hit in his 32-year career and became the first comedy album to hit Number 1 on the Billboard charts in over 50 years.

Dance phenomenon

Two screenshots from before and after the drop in a Harlem Shake video

• "Dancing Banana" – A banana dancing to the song "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" by the Buckwheat Boyz.
• Ghetto Kids of Uganda dancing "Sitya Loss" - A viral song of Ugandan singer Eddy Kenzo who featured the four Ugandan boys Alex Ssempijja, Fred and Isaac Tumusiime, Bashir Lubega and the girl Patricia Nabakooza dancing improvised moves in a competitive manner to his song. The video was made by Big Talent Entertainment and JahLive Films, and was directed by Mugerwa Frank.
• Hampster Dance – A page filled with hamsters dancing, linking to other animated pages. It spawned a fictional band complete with its own CD album release.
• Harlem Shake – A video based on Harlem shake dance, originally created by vlogger Filthy Frank and using an electronica version of the song by Baauer. In such videos, one person is dancing or acting strange among a room full of others going about routine business, until after the drop and a video cut, everyone starts dancing or acting strangely. The attempts to recreate the dance has led to a viral spread on YouTube.
• "Indian Thriller" – A viral scene from the Indian film Donga with added subtitles phonetically approximating the original lyrics as English sentences.
• JK Wedding Entrance Dance – The wedding procession for Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz of St. Paul, Minnesota, choreographed to the song Forever by Chris Brown. Popularized on YouTube with 1.75 million views in less than five days in 2009. The video was later imitated in an episode of The Office on NBC.
• Little Superstar – A video of Thavakalai, a short Indian actor, break-dancing to MC Miker G & DJ Sven's remix of the Madonna song "Holiday", in a clip from a 1990 Tamil film Adhisaya Piravi, featuring actor Rajnikanth.
• Techno Viking – A Nordic raver dancing in a technoparade in Berlin.
• "Thriller" by the CPDRC Dancing Inmates – A recreation of Michael Jackson's hit performed by prisoners at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC) in the Philippines. As of January 2010, it is among the ten most popular videos on YouTube with over 20 million hits.

Music phenomena

A Rick Astley impersonator rickrolling a basketball game

• Anime Music Videos/MADs – A staple of anime conventions both in Japan and Western countries, these fan-made videos take footage from various anime works and re-edit them in different order, addition of new soundtracks (including to full-length songs), and other manipulations such as lip-syncing characters to lyrics; with the propagation of the Internet and popularity of anime in the United States in 2003, this type of user-created content flourished, and grew to include footage from other works including video games and Western animated shows.
• Hurra Torpedo – A Norwegian band whose coast-to-coast tour was a viral campaign to promote the Ford Fusion car.
• Lucian Piane, aka RevoLucian – Created several popular celebrity techno remixes, including a spoof on actor Christian Bale titled "Bale Out"
• Literal music video – Covers of music videos where the original lyrics have been replaced with ones that literally describe the events that occur in the video, typically disconnected with the original lyrics of the song.
• Rickrolling – A phenomenon involving posting a URL in an Internet forum that appears to be relevant to the topic at hand, but is, in fact, a link to a video of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up". The practice originated on 4chan as a "Duckroll", in which an image of a duck on wheels was what was linked to. The practice of Rickrolling became popular after April Fools' Day in 2008 when YouTube rigged every feature video on its home page to Rick Astley's song.

Others

• "Lazy Sunday" – A 2005 Saturday Night Live sketch written and performed by Andy Samburg and Chris Parnell in which the two engage in a hip-hop song about their plans for a lazy Sunday afternoon. The song was uploaded by fans to YouTube, at that time a relative small, new site, and had been watched by millions of users before it was taken down as a copyright violation by NBC. This created the idea of being able to provide reuse of television material on the Internet, giving shows a second life, and is stated to have established YouTube as a potential revenue source for television networks, contributing towards Google's purchase of the site for $1.6 billion in 2006.
• "PPAP (Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen)" – A Japanese earworm-style music video performed by Pikotaro.
• "Pokémon Theme Music Video" – A video featuring Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla lip-syncing to the original English Pokémon theme song. The video became the most viewed video on YouTube at the time before it was removed. The success of their Pokémon video and other videos led Smosh to be featured in the "Person of the Year: You" issue of Time Magazine, published December 13, 2006 and on Time.com.
• Trololo – A 1976 televised performance of Russian singer Eduard Khil lip-syncing the song I Am Glad to Finally Be Home (Я очень рад, ведь я, наконец, возвращаюсь домой). The video's first mainstream appearance was on The Colbert Report, on 3 March 2010; since then, its popularity has escalated, occasionally being used as part of a bait and switch prank, similar to Rickrolling.