But copyright acts in ’76 and ’98 extended protection, so now, Warner will keep printing money off of “Happy Birthday to You” until 2030.According to McCartney, Birthday was written one afternoon while John and Paul were on break from the studio. When Jessica Hill originally copyrighted the song in 1935, it was set to enter the public domain in 1991-or in two 28-year terms, as per the law back then. Check out 6 Crimes You Don't Know You're Committing.)ĥ. (That's not the only seemingly harmless act that's actually illegal. But unless Warner’s got your house or office bugged-and honestly, you never know-you can sing it in private without ponying up.
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That’s why you almost never hear the tune in TV shows or movies, and it’s the reason restaurants create their own uncomfortable, borderline nonsensical birthday songs to unleash upon unsuspecting eaters. Technically, every time you croon the song in public, you owe Warner a small royalty-which adds up to a reported $2 million a year.
What, you think you can just walk around and sing “Happy Birthday to You” all willy-nilly and get away with it? Nice try, buddy. Obscenely rich people-they’re just like us!) (Fun fact: For many years, Michael Jackson owned the majority of McCartney’s Beatles songs. But that’s not true Macca just owns a ton of other musicians’ catalogs, including Buddy Holly’s. There’s an urban legend that former Beatle Paul McCartney snatched up the rights.
The song’s publishing rights kept getting transferred via business expansions and acquisitions throughout the 20th century-we won’t bore you with the details-but the last we checked, “Happy Birthday to You” now belongs solely to a subsidiary of the publishing arm of Warner Music Group. Seven years later, Hill sued that publisher for royalties over a licensing dispute, but then everyone made up, presumably content to just sit back and watch the money roll in. After a lawsuit fizzled out, she partnered with a publishing company to finally, officially copyright the song in 1935. Upon hearing it, Jessica Hill-sibling of Mildred and Patty-was pissed that her sisters were missing out on songwriting credit and compensation. In 1933, Irving Berlin used the “Good Morning to All” melody in his musical, As Thousands Cheer. Lots of people have sued each other over it. But somewhere along the line, someone put the now-famous words to the melody, and by the mid-1930s the combo tune had pretty much become the standard birthday song.Ģ. You can credit the indelible melody to Kentucky sisters Mildred and Patty Hill, who wrote the original song-called “Good Morning to All,” with completely different lyrics-way back in 1893 as a musical greeting for kindergarten teachers to sing to their students every morning. (And for more fun and depressing b-day facts, discover What Your Birth Month Says About You.) So in honor of Facebook’s special day, here are five surprising facts about the iconic song-which, once again, even friggin’ babies know by heart. And we’ll happily provide the prescription if it means more page views for us. which is actually a little weird, too, now that we think about it.įor whatever reason, it looks like America’s got a bad case of birthday fever. The Guinness Book of World Records named “Happy Birthday to You”-all 12 whopping words of it-the most recognizable song in the English language, yet more people searched for it last month than “Let It Go” from Frozen (#2), “Shake It Off” by Taylor Swift (#3), and Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” (#4). Why, in the year 2015, would millions of Americans flock to Google to look up the one song that literally everyone in the world-including 2-year-olds!-knows all the words to? Did they forget how it goes? Was there some kind of quiz? Look, we’ve thought long and hard about this, and it doesn’t make a lick of sense. Want to hear something else that’s equally perplexing? The tune was Google’s most-searched song in January, according to the company’s trending charts. It’s crazy, but true-singing “Happy Birthday to You” in public is illegal. Hey, happy birthday, Facebook! We’d sing you a song, but it turns out we’d be breaking the law.
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