♫ Pretty Little Baby (Connie Francis)

Apple released a new feature for Apple Music that seemed silly to me at first. I refuse to lay blame upon Apple for using the word "Viral" in the name of the feature, nor will I accept any blame for judging Apple Music's Shazam Viral Chart prematurely.

See things from my perspective. For literal decades, PR people have been declaring something to be Viral (citing…well, the proper authorities who certify such things) and alerting me that they could arrange a personal interview with the creator of the Viral thing if (if) I wasted no time responding to this email..

Suffice to say I didn’t waste any of my time getting in touch.

And I'm not exaggerating when I speak of "literal decades." I'm thinking of the time that this video "went viral" in 1999. This was way before social media…before YouTube, even; back then, if we got super-excited about a video, we'd burn it onto a whole spindle of CD-Rs and then slip them into a town's water supply:

As I recall, I got a PR blast from someone claiming to rep Gloria Gaynor. I hope I'm misremembering; why not seize an opportunity to chat with Disco royalty?

Anyway. I have this touchy relationship with the word "viral." But the Shazam Viral Chart turns out to be more than slightly fascinating.

There are loads of Top (quantity) Most Viral lists out there. The Virality of those lists are all validated by those same…Proper Authorities. But this one is clever and legit: it’s a Top 50 list of songs ranked by how frequently Shazam has ID’d them over the past week.

This seems like an authentic form of validation for music. By definition, a person only asks Shazam to ID a song when they’re so excited by what they’re hearing that they needed to know what it was, and they raced the clock to deploy their phone and ID the song before it ended. This song is so good that people hear it for the first time and instantly recognize that if it left their lives forever, well, that'd just break their hearts.

Here’s how the Viral Chart is described within Apple Music. It’s quite unfortunate. I ask that you not let this put you off:

Forget everything you thought you knew about viral music. Shazam's new Viral Chart playlist doesn't just track TikTok hits—it captures the full spectrum of songs blowing up right now, whether through streaming, socials, TV placements, or that random 2004 banger suddenly resurfacing at bars and baseball games. Here, you'll find today's fastest-growing sounds from around the world, identified by millions of curious listeners frantically hitting that Shazam button.

No, no: this playlist is a true reflection of both (a) a song's instanteous want-ability, and (b) how we tend to find music these days.

I have a folder on my home media server called “Orphan Tracks.” It’s where I put a track if I don’t own the complete album on which it appears.

Every one of those songs got into my head, and from there into my music library, via the damnedest routes. I look through this Orphan Tracks folder and I recognize how I encountered many, if not most, of them:

• While eating at an awesome ramen shop in Cambridge;
• While recovering from jet-lag in a Beijing hotel room;
• While watching a really weird VH1 reality show where the host would ambush members of long-defunct 80s bands into agreeing to a reunion concert;
• In the back of an Uber (this is why I never ask my driver to turn off their personal music)

I might not have used Shazam to identify each of those songs (or the hundreds I discovered elsewhere). But the principle is the same. Despite the coked-up intensity of music marketing, no promotional campaign will ever be more effective than a delightful, totally unorchestrated Meet Cute between an old song and a new fan.

I got Apple’s press release for Shazam’s Viral Chart playlist and I clicked the link. I don’t know what I expected to see on this list. I certainly didn’t expect to see a pop singer from the beehive hairdo era of the early Sixties at the #1 position. My reaction was in no way a reflection of Connie Francis, but all the same: how the hell?

I listened to “Pretty Little Baby” two or three times (because it’s a swell piece of music). Then I felt the urge to prosecute the “…but how the hell?” aspect of this. It turns out that scores of people on TikTok are lip-syncing to this song while modeling new outfits, humblebragging about their relationships, grilling a steak to a perfect medium-rare without even checking the internal temperature…those kinds of things.

People reached out to Ms. Francis for her reaction to “Pretty Little Baby” zooming up the charts, 60 plus years after its LP debut. She appears to be exactly as surprised, delighted, and grateful as you can imagine. She’d forgotten all about “Pretty Baby” (it was never even released as a single). Winning scores of new fans in her late Eighties must seem like an unexpected late-life gift. I count myself among them, even though I’m embarrassed to admit that I had to go back through this post during the editing phase and change “Connie Stevens” to “Connie Francis” wherever it occurred.

I spooled up “Pretty Little Baby” again before writing this. Is that a Hammond organ skirling through the intro? It’s pepperminty and pleasant and I’ve just hit the Play button for the fourth time in the past twenty minutes. You’d call this song a “confection,” if you’re a sensible person who understands that this is a compliment, and a style of fluffy pop music that will never go away.

“I think it's innocent and pure,” Ms. Francis told People, “and this is a time when everything is in such chaos.”

Whoosh. Truer words were never spoken.

I plan to revisit the Shazam Viral Chart regularly. It’s healthy to insert a little of the old “I’m feeling lucky” randomness into one’s music discovery.

That said, when I discover a song on the chart that I really like, I think I’ll try to resist the urge to learn why it’s suddenly gone viral.

“It’s in the brand-new trailer for an upcoming AAA game” would be fine. But I don’t know how I’d feel if I fell in love with a song and then found out that it’s hitting the charts because of a dangerous new trend among middle-schoolers known as “The Mel Cooley Challenge,” the details of which you're probably better off not knowing. ⓘ