130 years ago, in Louisville, Kentucky, two sisters named Patty and Mildred Hill wrote songs for children - songs that were simple, repetitive, and easy to sing. But before the world knew Happy Birthday, the tune was just an obscure little ditty. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers - that’s ASCAP, for short - well, they once called it “far and away” the most popular song of the 20th century. The more Nelson looked into the history of the world’s most familiar song, the more she realized that the story she’d been told about its ownership was questionable.įor the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is The Economics of Everyday Things. Like, doesn’t that song belong to everybody? NELSON: I just thought it was nuts! I was pissed, too. To use it, her show would have to pay thousands of dollars in licensing fees. And she found out something that blew her mind: The song - a song that you and I have sung hundreds, if not thousands, of times, a song that forms a critical part of an American ritual - it was the property of one of the world’s largest music publishers. So, Nelson decided to look into it herself. NELSON: My producer was like, “You can’t film anybody singing the Happy Birthday song - just don’t do that.” And I was like, “What do you mean? This is a show about birthdays and we can’t sing the Happy Birthday song?” Everybody on the crew always thought it was so dumb, but nobody really looked into it. And they would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on these birthday parties, and arrive in helicopters or, you know, have elephants on display.Įarly on, she got a confusing mandate from her boss. Jennifer NELSON: I was a producer at M.T.V., and I was working on a popular show called “My Super Sweet 16.” It was about lavish, over-the-top birthdays for wealthy kids. About a decade ago, Jennifer Nelson was working in the trenches of reality television.
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