northeast11

Since Christmas was a few days ago at the time this thread was created, I will say Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You". This song is more popular now than it was when it was released in 1994.

Noonan

Bohemian Rhapsody post Wayne's World.

fujishig

Christmas songs are definitely special. I assume at least part of this phenomenon is the advent of streaming and being able to track streaming, as well as inclusion on Christmas playlists. I bet the same is true about views of classic Christmas movies.

Wham's Last Christmas finally made Christmas number 1 on the UK charts:
https://www.officialcharts.com/chart...drew-ridgeley/

Rocking Around the Christmas Tree also made the top of the Billboard Hot 100 this year with Brenda Lee making a new music video. Lee is 78, she recorded it when she was 13.

But there are I'm sure a ton of instances where new media has used a song and elevated the audience. Didn't that just happen with Last of Us?

Decker

Literally, headline from 5 days ago :
TOP OF THE HILL

Kate Bush rakes in over £8million as Running Up That Hill shoots to top of the charts 37 years on from release

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/25147108/kate-bush-profits-running-up-that-hill/https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbi...-up-that-hill/

cultshock

Not quite to the same degree, but Metallica's "Master of Puppets" also benefited from it's Stranger Things exposure, especially with the young folks.

milo bloom

That got play on the rock stations where I was living in Kentucky at the time, that's a massive thing to happen for an older song like that in an area like that.


Edit: I was a bit off here, it was written for CeeLo Green, who recorded it but didn't release it. Pharrel later did it himself.

Pharrel's "Happy" was apparently originally released to a generally "meh" reaction. Sometime later it got picked for the first Despicable Me movie and became a massive hit.
Though I will stand by my assertion that Weird Al's parody "Tacky" is a much more creative use of the melody.

northeast11

"Red Red Wine" by UB40 peaked at 34 in the US Billboard Top 100 chart in 1984. The song was re-released after it was played at Nelson Mandela's birthday in 1988. It became a # 1 song later that year.

"Bad Boys" by Inner Circle after it became theme song for the TV show "Cops". I'm sure there are other songs that became more popular after it featured on a TV show or movie.

Decker

That one is incorrect. It was written for the movie and was nominated for an Oscar, something that can only happen with original songs.

Paff

Yeah, that was Linda Ronstadt's "Long Long Time"

Other times that happened:
Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock and Roll" (due to Risky Business)
The Proclaimers' "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" (due to Benny and Joon)

milo bloom

What am I thinking of? I was absolutely sure of that one, but I can't seem to find the sources I had before that said that it was released before the movie.

Edit: found it, it was written and actually recorded by Ceelo Green, but Green's label didn't think it wasn't right for that time.

From the Wiki entry.

Josh-da-man

Yeah, definitely Queen's "Bohemhian Rhapsody." With Wayne's World, it actually replaced "We Are the Champions" as their signature song.

As for the topic, one that comes to mind is Danzig's "Mother." It was first video from their self-titled debut album in 1988, but it became even more popular and a minor hit around 1993 when it was re-released to promote the band's "thrall-demonsweatlive" EP.

PhantomStranger

Another one is McCartney's Wonderful Christmastime, which is much bigger now than it ever was upon release. It basically disappeared from the cultural radar for 20 years and then started growing in fame I want to say in the 2000s.

Music programmers I think decided they needed to sprinkle in newer holiday songs since most of the true Christmas classics are a relatively narrow list of songs released in the 1950s and 1960s. So we get songs like Carey's and McCartney's becoming much bigger than they ever were upon release.

Paff

Just heard one on the radio today: Hall & Oates' "You Make my Dreams Come True".

And since we're discussing songs that gained in popularity after appearing on a movie soundtrack, you can pretty much say any song from a Tarantino movie. Songs like "Stuck in the Middle With You", "Miserlou", "Battle Without Honor or Humanity", and "Woo Hoo" all became commonplace after Quentin put them in a movie.

Kdogg

After Ghost was released Unchained Melody became inescapable.

There’s been a few lately because of TikTok. Dreams by Fleetwood Mac and Someone’s Watching Me by Rockwell.

Then there’s a category of people rediscovering relativity new songs like Swift’s Cruel Summer years after release. Hell she would have a bunch herself.

rw2516

Space Oddity
Smoke On the Water
Dream On
all became hits some years later after artist became big

Mondo Kane

I most certainly heard DON'T STOP BELIEVIN' more times in the 2000s than I did in the 80s.

TheAllPurposeNothing

Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" was largely unknown until the 1999 Volkswagen commercial.

Perkinsun Dzees

"Tempted was released as the second single from Squeeze's fourth album, East Side Story, in 1981. The single was only a moderate chart hit at the time; however, it has since become one of the band's most famous songs, appearing in movies (Reality Bites, 1994), TV shows, video games, and commercials."

Bluelitespecial

I'd be curious to know who makes Money off of this song as it was one of those "Cause Songs" which were big in the 80s. It was Virtue Signaling before it became a thing. It's always played relentlessly on radio stations that play Christmas music 24/7 in November and December.

Decker

It’s raised over £200million to help fight famine in Africa since its release in 1984 and is one of the UK's best-selling Yuletide hits. Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, who co-wrote it, have never seen a penny in royalties. If I might offer a word of advice, drop idiotic right wing terminology like ‘virtue signaling’ entirely — but if nothing else, certainly when it just demonstrates how uninformed you are about a particular subject.

Bluelitespecial

I was curious for a "cause song" if the money it raised still went to the cause or went in the pockets of record executives. Sounds like it might be a little bit of both.

Kdogg

Add in another £150 million from the Live Aid concerts. Geldof is many things but he'd never take money meant for starving children.

Paff

And we're all worse off for it

cultshock

Another one is Ghost's Mary on a Cross, originally released in 2019 as the B-side of the Seven Inches of Satanic Panic 7" single, but went viral on TikTok in 2022, and made it the band's first song to chart on the Billboard Top 100.

Alan Smithee

Forever Young by Alphaville also got more popular a few years after it was released, and so did Send Me an Angel by Real Life although they had also done a newer version of that song which I didn’t like as much.

I first heard West End Girls by Pet Shop Boys on “The Quake” in San Francisco in late 1984, and was one of my favorite songs then which went ignored by the mainstream. It became a hit in 1986 with a re-worked version, it was good to hear the song again but I immediately thought “they ruined it!” when hearing the stuff they added to it. Pet Shop Boys proved they could write far more than one good song though and they’ve been among my favorite artists since then.