The classic children’s song has become a viral sensation, also leading the Kid Digital Song Sales chart for a sixth week.
It’s official: “Baby Shark” fever has taken over the globe.
The children’s song, which has launched itself into the hearts of adults and kids alike thanks to a viral dance challenge, tops the LyricFind Global chart dated Oct. 27.
The LyricFind Global and LyricFind U.S. charts rank the fastest momentum-gaining tracks in lyric-search queries globally and in the U.S., respectively, provided by LyricFind. The Global chart includes queries from all countries except the U.S. The company is the world's leader in licensed lyrics, with data provided by more than 4,000 publishers and utilized by more than 100 services, including Amazon, Pandora, Deezer, Microsoft, Yahoo, SoundHound and iHeartRadio. The latest tracking week ended Oct. 21.
The song, attributed to Pinkfong (a South Korea-based education brand that made a video of children dancing and singing along to the song), rises 3-1 on the LyricFind Global chart as it continues to leap in overall search volume and velocity across the world. The track had previously debuted at No. 3 on the Oct. 20-dated list.
Though it has yet to make the America-only LyricFind U.S. chart, the “Baby Shark” craze has indeed found its way to Billboard charts that incorporate U.S.-specific data. Concurrently, the track spends its sixth week (and third consecutive) atop the Kid Digital Song Sales chart (3,000 downloads, according to Nielsen Music) and recently debuted at No. 24 on YouTube Songs. Video views, in fact, drive much of the song’s overall streams, with 67 percent of its 8.4 million streams in the Oct. 12-18 tracking week coming from video views.
Long a song associated with singalongs for children, the song gained its most recent popularity (and corresponding chart success) after the Pinkfong version’s video initially became a viral video in Indonesia, eventually spreading to other countries before making its way Stateside. The Baby Shark Challenge associated with the song finds participants singing along to the song while making hand motions associated with each member of the shark’s family. The original Pinkfong video, uploaded in June 2016, has 1.9 billion global views at press time.