Anything can be uploaded and shared online, but only a fraction ever goes viral.
Rarer still are those viral moments that capture the attention of internet sleuths, can ever ignite a shared curiosity to solve what they believe is a true mystery.
And this time, among the extremely rare cases, is a mystery that dates back to the 1980s.
Appearing in the form of a song and first uploaded to the internet in the 2000s, it has baffled a lot of internet users that sleuths have dubbed it “The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet,” simply because no one has been able to identify its title, nor the band.
The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet has been one of the longest-running internet mysteries, and solving it involved users from various platforms, brainstorming together by scouting corners of the web they can put their nose into.
The person, who claimed to be the sister of the person who recorded the cassette, uploaded a digital copy of the song to the internet through various online forums because she wanted to know anything she could about the song.
It didn’t get much attention.
Over the years various people would stumble onto the mystery and attempt to help, but there wasn’t much movement.
Then, in 2019, a Reddit user who goes by the name gabgaskins posted the song the song in 44 different music subreddits, and subsequently sparked the creation of the r/TheMysteriousSong subreddit.
Then, on that same year, the song caught the attention of YouTuber Just Whang, who made a video about it.
While sleuths kept on digging, they found less and less clues.
And as years went on, after hearing tracks after tracks, and listening to different channels and streams through different strategies and methods on various platforms, it was a dead end.
Then suddenly, one user shared that the song was first aired at Norddeutscher Rundfunk, or NDR, a public radio and television broadcaster, based in Hamburg, Germany.
More specifically, the song was first aired at NDR1, at the radio station's Musik Für Junge Leute or "Music for Young People" program.
After tracking down the host who happened to air the song, even the person couldn't help.
The DJ, a British-born Paul Baskerville, is still working at NDR. However, he doesn't remember anything about the song. In fact, he isn't even sure that he ever played the song during his show.
But even if he did, it could be sitting in his collection of 10,000 vinyl records, which includes the music he spun on-air.
"If you’re a collector, you know most of what you have," he said.
The hunt was catching so much attention on the internet, that even some major publications in the music industry wrote something about it.
To filter the abundance of information shared by the internet sleuths, they set up a Discord server, ran analysis on different versions of the song from different sources, and cataloged dozens of leads.
After all, they have seen a lot of fake leads, hoaxes, false positives, and misinformation.
All they wanted was to put only the necessary information that are legit.
Then, months later, sleuths who began narrowing their search to songs from Germany, focused on Hörfest, an annual showcase of local musicians sponsored by a public broadcaster in Hamburg.
The community compiled a list of hundreds of bands from the era that could have possibly played at the festival and began to go through them.
It was at this time, that they finally found what they thought could be the key to solving the mystery.
In October, in a subreddit that talked about the Weekend HörQuest #1, someone posted the first list of bands from the Hörfest archives, making the bands available for the sleuths to analyze.
Suddenly, one of the sleuths, a Redditor named marijn1412, ultimately solved the case.
According to the user, the person came across an old newspaper article in the Nordwest Zeitung—a regional newspaper in Germany—about two weeks before.
"The article was about a band called FEX from Kiel, who won a talent contest in Bremen in [September] 1984 and their music was described as Rock with Wave and Pop influences," marijn1412 wrote in the post on the r/TheMysteriousSong subreddit.
The user who happened to recognize one of the names, Michael Hädrich, in the Nordwest Zeitung as a member of a band at Hörfest 83 called Phret-Band.
The user managed to contact the band member, and asked the person whether "he still had some old material from those bands."
After the person sent marijn1412 some of the songs he made with FEX, " behold, one of them was titled Subways Of Your Mind," marijn1412 said on Reddit.
When marijn1412 recognized the song, the user reached back out to Hädrich to explain the situation.
Hädrich was surprised.
He had no idea that their song was famous on the internet for being considered a lost media.
At first, he wanted marijn1412 to stay quiet, while he contacted the other members of the band. After the song was registered in the GEMA, a German organization for musicians, and after Hädrich received permission from FEX, he gave marijn1412 the green light.
According to marijn1412, FEX is planning to have a reunion.
For the first time after 40 years from the time they recorded the piece, and about 20 years after it became an internet mystery, the members are getting the band back together to play the old hits of theirs.
It's worth noting that while the general internet considers this a solved case, some of the sleuths are still looking for more information to validate what they think they believe.
This is why the Discord server is put in a read-only mode, while can together come to a conclusion.
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