This is one of the most interesting-to-me things I’ve ever heard. All kinds of songs get stuck in your head. Famous pop tunes from when you were a kid, album cuts you’ve listened to over and over again. And then there’s a category of memorable songs—the ones that we all just kind of know. Songs that somehow, without anyone’s permission, sneak their way into the collective unconscious and are now just lingering there for eternity. There’s one song that best exemplifies this phenomenon— “Who Let The Dogs Out” by the Baha Men.

There are millions of cover songs on YouTube, with around 12,000 new covers uploaded in the last 24 hours. Until recently, all but a sliver were illegal, considered infringement under current copyright law. Nearly all were non-commercial, created out of love by fans of the source material, with no negative impact on the market value of the original. This is creativity criminalized, quite possibly the most popular creative act that's against the law.

Explanatory stills from (and a link to) the fantastic new Spoon video.