The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet, also known as "Like the Wind" "Check it In, Check it Out" and "Summer Blues", is a mysterious 1980s new wave song. It is by far the most popular and viral mysterious song, hence its name.

1980s-2004: Origin
In around 1984, a German teenager named Darius S. recorded this song onto a BASF Chromdioxid II 90 cassette tape from the German radio station Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR).

Unknown Pleasures
For his birthday in 2004, his sister Lydia H. bought him a website domain called Unknown Pleasures, named after the Joy Division album, Unknown Pleasures. Darius then digitized his old radio recordings and used the website to help spread the search for some mysterious songs he had (his other formerly mysterious song, "Old Ned" by Blue in Heaven, was posted here too).

bluuue/Anton Riedel era
On March 18, 2007, Lydia posted the first 1:15 to the Usenet group de.rec.musik.recherche, and continued her search on spiritofradio.ca and best-of-80s.de under the pseudonym Anton Riedel and username bluuue. The snippet slowly spread across the internet after this, reaching WatZatSong in 2009 and YouTube in 2011.

2017-Spring 2019: Gabriel Vieira expands the search
On September 20, 2017, the Spanish independent record label Dead Wax Records uploaded Anton's snippet of the song to YouTube. It caught the attention of a friend of Nicolás Zúñiga (the owner of Dead Wax) named Gabriel Vieira in early 2019, who posted the snippet to several different Reddit subs, coining the name "The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet". On June 30, 2019, r/TheMysteriousSong was founded. That day, the subreddit found the original post from bluuue as well as the other forum posts. They discovered that the song was likely aired on an NDR show called Musik für Junge Leute and began to contact the show's DJ Paul Baskerville for any leads. Links to the full version were found on the old forums but did not work because the file sharing websites Lydia used were defunct by 2019.

Summer 2019-Spring 2020: Media Coverage and Lydia Rejoins
On July 9, 2019, YouTuber Justin Whang discussed the search for the song on an episode of his YouTube series called Tales From the Internet. After the video was posted, Reddit user u/johnnymetoo, who followed Lydia's original search on Usenet, revealed he had downloaded the complete song in 2007, and posted it to r/TheMysteriousSong. Later that month, Gabriel Vieira contacted Paul Baskerville, who said he didn't know the song, but was interested in playing the song on his new show, Nachtclub. This was how another mysterious song, On the Roof, was identified, but TMS did not have the same luck. After Paul played TMS on Nachtclub, he told Gabriel that he received negative feedback from listeners.

In August 2019, the German radio station Radio Eins aired the song, along with an interview from Paul Baskerville. Darius heard the song on the radio prompting his sister to get in touch with Gabriel about rejoining the search. In September, she then digitized the entire tape TMS was on which included other, mostly popular, songs Darius recorded.

In late 2019 and into early 2020, news media outlets, the most notable being Rolling Stone ran the story of the mysterious song on their websites in order to attract new attention to the search. Many of these outlets were German media outlets. Unfortunately, no significant leads came of these articles.

It was later discovered in early 2020 that the synth used in the chorus was a Yamaha DX7. The DX7 was released in 1983, meaning that TMS could not be from any earlier than that year.

Summer 2020-Present: NDR Playlists
In July 2020, Reddit user u/flexxonmobil obtained a list all of the songs Paul Baskerville played on Musik für Junge Leute from 1982 to 1984. While TMS was not found on these lists, this prompted Lydia to get in touch with the archivist at NDR for more playlists. All of the songs played on Musik für Junge Leute from 1982-1984 were found, but TMS wasn't found. As of February 2021, 1984 lists from Der Club, Nachtclub, and No Wave, other shows Darius listened to on NDR are being searched.

10 KHz Line
In December 2020, it was revealed using spectrogram analysis that TMS was 100% played on NDR. This is because there is a 10 KHz line in the recording that was found on other NDR recordings, even others that were not from Darius. This proves that the 10 KHz line was not from the tape deck used to record the tapes. Furthermore, a forum post from 2003 confirms the 10 KHz modulation scheme NDR used. The reason this was important is that Darius recorded from other stations such as the Dutch station Hilversum, which did not have the 10 KHz line.

List of Leads
Due to the popularity of this song, we cannot fit all the leads here. Please refer to the spreadsheet. Note that you cannot edit this spreadsheet as it is owned by the mods of The Mysterious Song subreddit and Discord, and they did not give everyone edit permission. If you have any info on a lead or would like to add a new one, refer to the FAQ sheet.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GePlaroCOz_jYHlR5Gcr4DfdGjUq-12C967ZBIn0Rns/edit?usp=sharing