Reddit groups manage to solve a musical mystery on the internet

For years, a small but very committed community has gathered on the Internet, dedicated body and soul to identifying an “elusive song.” On Monday, after an exhaustive search that lasted 17 years, they announced that they had finally found her. Now that “the most mysterious song on the internet” has a name and group, it leaves behind an entire music subculture’lostwave’ extending from the ribbons cassette even Spotify. Even amid their success, many researchers are unsure what will happen to the community now that they have achieved their goal. What happens to the lost material once it comes to light?

This is his name

Now we know that the song in question is called ‘Subways of Your Mind’from FEXand until Monday he had lived up to his nickname. The song was recorded on the German radio station NDR in the early 80s and was nothing more than a question mark on a box of cassette until 2007, when it was digitized and posted on various Usenet newsgroups and music forums, along with requests for Internet help in identifying the track.

An article published in 2019 in Rolling Stone recounts how the song’s ambiguity and retro charm helped attract a community of music lovers and amateur researchers. The community would grow and change along with the internet itself, moving from YouTube to Reddit to Discord, and finally back to Paul Baskerville, the DJ who would have played the song in the first place. He couldn’t find it in his collection of more than 10,000 vinyl records and, speaking with Rolling Stoneadmitted: “I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I don’t think it’s a particularly interesting song.”

This is a relatively common reaction to music.lostwave’ or ‘lost wave’, the general term for these unidentified pre-internet songsthose that didn’t have a niche before the search for “the most mysterious song” became one. But for music lovers accustomed to Genius and Shazam, an unidentified song is both a splinter in the mind and an opportunity to delve into a hidden, non-digitized culture.

“The searches for lostwave They promote collaboration and community participation beyond the reach of digital platforms. They give people the opportunity to contribute to research that anyone with a critical approach can advance,” says Josh Chapdelaine, professor of media studies at Queens College.

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Unity is strength

The first breakthrough in years came in May, when a user on the bustling Reddit community ‘r/TheMysteriousSong’ found a reference to “Hörfest,” a competition for amateur bands that the station holds each year in Hamburg, Germany. “It was a very likely way to solve our puzzle, since it was a good explanation for why a tape of an amateur band would have been broadcast on the NDR, which normally had a high standard,” says Arne, a moderator of the subreddit who publishes under the alias @LordElend. Arne did not want to give his last name for privacy reasons. A search of the local administration archives turned up thousands of pages about the Hörfest, but it would not be easy to go through them all. “We realized that the 800 bands, most of them obscure and not on Google, would need a larger group of researchers,” suggests Arne.

Soon, hundreds of people across multiple platforms were collaborating on extensive spreadsheets with lists of group members, sounds, songs, and anything else they could find. One of these researchers, who uses the alias @marijn1412, discovered that Phret, one of the members of a group that appeared in the spreadsheets, had joined another group called FEX. Upon contacting former FEX members, they confirmed the origin of the song. They waited to announce the find publicly until the band could sign and provide a clearer recording of the song.