Lifestyle
How a catchy tune became the soundtrack to TikTok's silliest videos
MIDI inputs in Logic for the song Monkeys Spinning Monkeys taken from Kevin MacLeod’s Youtube channel. Unlike other artists who seek to protect the rights to their creative work, McLeod encourages anyone to use his music for free. “I just want my stuff to be heard,” he says.
Kevin MacLeod/YouTube/Screenshot for NPR
hide caption
toggle caption
Kevin MacLeod/YouTube/Screenshot for NPR
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 proliferation of viral, loopable songs that immediately telegraph a video’s mood on digital platforms designed for ease of copying sound from video to video.
The man behind the monkeys
Kevin MacLeod is a prolific composer who got his start as a computer programmer. He created songs for fun on his computer and in front of audiences at improv comedy shows.
MacLeod’s compositions are what’s known as “library music,” stockpiles of songs that content creators draw upon to score their works. These are the sort of melodies that you would never queue up on Spotify but end up in the background of all sorts of things: video games, films, and countless short videos.
“Usually, I’ll be like watching a YouTube video and the music sucks,” says MacLeod. “And I’m like, well, let me try to do something better.”
And once he tries his hand at something better, he releases it for free.
In the early days of his career, MacLeod would craft his own licenses — not to protect his rights, but to give them away. MacLeod says his approach was to “find a license, and then do everything the opposite,” adding clauses like “you have the right to use this for your personal things. You have the right to use this commercially. You can sell this thing in another product if you want to.”
Then Creative Commons came along, standardizing royalty-free rights. While some composers and industry people argue that such sharing undermines composers’ ability to make a living, MacLeod says he just wants his work out in the world.
“I just want my stuff to be heard,” explains MacLeod. “You know, you gotta make it as easy as possible.”
Soundtracks spread with two taps of a finger
In the early days of YouTube, users posted pretty much anything regardless of copyright, says Bondy Kaye, a researcher at the University of Leeds and cofounder of the TikTok Cultures Research Network.
But with crackdowns by digital fingerprinting programs like Content ID, Kaye says people increasingly turned to royalty-free songs, including “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys.”
“And then you just follow that train as it goes all the way to TikTok,” says Kaye.
Kaye says that while YouTube lets users upload new videos, TikTok makes it easier to create videos that build off existing content with features that allow users to splice a reaction video alongside the original, take a short clip from it, or reuse the music. (Instagram also contains a similar feature.)
“So if you happen to see a viral video, with just two taps of your finger, you can create and publish a new video using that same song.”
As more people saw TikToks with “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys,” more people made TikToks with “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys,” too.
Something magical about “Monkeys”
TikTok said they couldn’t provide us with all-time numbers, but rankings by industry watchers over the last few years routinely show “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” among the most used songs on the platform. MacLeod says that out of his 2,000 compositions, “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” accounts for half of all listens.
“Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” contains a fluty melody and bouncy bass line— musical elements that signal “fun” to the listener.
YouTube
Even with the Creative Commons license, he’s still earned over seven figures—mostly from other countries that don’t always follow the same payment protocol.
So is “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” just a song in the right place, with the right permissions, at the right time? Or is there something special about it that makes it such an appealing soundtrack for our favorite silly, joyful highlights?
“The answer is both,” jokes Paula Harper, a musicologist at the University of Chicago who writes about sound and the internet.
Harper says “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” subtly uses some classic musical references, like its booming bass line.
Musicologist Paula Harper says “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” shares some elements from classical music, like this aria by Mozart. Both songs feature a bouncy bass line that highlights the songs’ intended comic relief.
YouTube
“You can find examples going back to the 18th century where composers like Mozart are using boom, boom, boom, boom,” says Harper, mimicking the bouncing bass line, “to signify this is goofy, this is silly, this is comic relief.” For example, she points to the first aria in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, “Notte e Giorno Faticar,” when a similar baseline introduces Leporello as “the goofy comic-relief servant character.”
Then there’s a melody “that is definitely evocative of something like a calliope, like a carousel,” says Harper. A good example, she says, is the circus march “Barnum and Bailey’s Favorite,” which shares the same basic structure of a light melody on top of an alternating bass line.
The light, tinkling melody of “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” comes from computer-synthesized flutes, but evokes the same sort of carousel or circus atmosphere as songs like the march “Barnum and Bailey’s Favorite”
YouTube
When “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” comes on, Harper says people probably are not consciously thinking about old-timey circuses, and they’re definitely not thinking about Mozart. But together, the song plays on associations we already have to evoke a mood immediately.
Composer Kevin MacLeod acknowledges that “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” is musically unexceptional. “I mean, the mix isn’t particularly great. The instruments aren’t particularly great…. There’s nothing sonically interesting about it,” admits MacLeod.
But it pulls together these musical ideas in a way that lets you know what’s happening, and with – he thinks – a bit of subtlety.
“It’s not assaulting you with comedy. You know, there’s not slide whistles and train horns and cars honking,” laughs MacLeod. “People like it. People use it. And it does the thing.”
That “thing” has gone from platform to platform, cat video to cat video. And no matter what happens to TikTok, the sound of “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” will likely be stuck in our heads for years to come.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
-
Movie Reviews4 minutes agoBandar Movie Review: Bobby Deol roars in Anurag Kashyap’s unsettling legal thriller that refuses to spoon-feed
-
World12 minutes agoTaormina Film Festival Head Tiziana Rocca Says She Wants to Deliver a ‘Human Festival’ Amidst AI Boom, Asks Stars to Be ‘Generous’ to Local Audiences
-
Politics22 minutes agoVideo: Jan. 6 Rioter Hired by Pentagon
-
Lifestyle52 minutes ago
‘How to Rule the World’ explores education and power at Stanford University
-
Technology1 hour agoCyberdecks used to look like little laptops, but now they’re getting more personal
-
World1 hour agoPete Hegseth warns narco-terrorists as U.S. backs Bolivia’s government amid coup warnings
-
Politics1 hour agoDemocrats split over Tlaib’s Lebanon measure as Republicans seize on Hezbollah omission
-
Health1 hour agoPopular weight-loss diet shows surprising impact on serious mental health condition
