We found the Shooting Stars meme song and it’s pretty great

You’ve probably heard Bag Raiders’ Shooting Stars on social media recently…

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock or on a digital detox in the last few weeks, then you’ve probably seen this trend on social media. People have been sharing remix videos, particularly of people falling, with a synthwave aesthetic and catchy soundtrack – honestly, it’s a pretty great song.

On 23 January, user All Ski Casino posted Fat man does amazing dive – Shooting Stars. The video instantly went viral, achieving 100,000 views in its first 24 hours and over one million views in a month. It consists of remixed clips of dolphins, explosions, and a scene from Marvel film Ant-Man (2015) set to a catchy synthpop soundtrack. But that wasn’t the first video of its kind to feature the song.

A year earlier, in December 2015, a video titled Shooting Stars (old) surfaced. The animated video had under 10,000 views for the first year after it was posted and didn’t begin to gain attention until late January 2017, when the meme gained traction.

Numerous videos with a similar theme have since been posted to YouTube and Facebook where it has been shared the most. Many Facebook posts of the video include the description “Tag a friend and don’t say anything”.

Variants of the meme, which feature the song, include a Corgi jumping into water, a Harambe dance video, a Peppa Pig skydiving scene, and even clips of Michael Stevens from VSauce.

The Fine Brothers even featured the Shooting Stars meme in one of their Teens React episodes. In the video, some of the teen reactors also attempted to recreate the meme themselves. “The simplicity of it being completely random and shoving it on a rocket ship or in a bloodstream, it’s funny,” one reactor commented. Another said: “It would be nothing without the song. It gives you a whole new perspective on the song.”

The song used in these videos is unsurprisingly called Shooting Stars and was originally released as a single in 2009 by Australian electronic band Bag Raiders.

The band have recently spoken out about the rise of Shooting Stars. “The memes start coming and they don’t stop coming!” they said on the official Bag Raiders Facebook page as they shared one of the meme videos. “This is getting crazy, but we had to laugh at this one!”

The song originally peaked at Number 62 in the Australian singles chart and was even featured on Australia’s Got Talent in 2013, which reintroduced the song into the charts at Number 44.