How a catchy tune became the soundtrack to TikTok’s silliest videos

Turn to TikTok for some amusement, and you’ll find short videos of a fluffy cat cuddling a fluffy dog, a toddler clutching a bag of Doritos as though it were a teddy bear, or a penguin creating flipper-print artwork.

You’ll have to turn up the volume to hear what all these posts have in common: a song created ten years ago called “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” by Kevin MacLeod.

Although few people know the name of the song or the person who composed it, over the past decade, it’s served as the background music for millions of TikToks and has been played billions of times. It’s also all over Instagram and YouTube.

The song’s story illustrates one of the core ways that music and social media have shaped each other over the last decade—with the proliferationof viral, loopable songs that immediately telegraph a video’s mood on digital platforms designed for ease of copying sound from video to …