"I'm Yours" Ukulele Cover

About

I'm Yours by pop artist Jason Mraz was first released on a limited edition EP in 2005, first made available for purchase in 2008, spent 76 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, and has sold over 4.4 million digital copies making it the third best-selling digital song of all time. So it's no wonder that the more musically inclined Youtubers would upload their own covers of the immense pop hit.

But…

On December 6, 2009, Japanese Youtube user Uke3453 posted a video of his adorable, itchy-nosed, five year old son playing the song on a ukulele and singing along, despite not knowing either the lyrics or the language.

While it was not the first cover of the song, the video became an instant hit in a matter of days.

Most of the early video referrals came from Facebook. On December 7th, the video was featured on Youtube's homepage, and further views came from being featured on Urlesque.com on December 9th and The Huffington Post on December 12th.

As of December 14th, the video has over 4 million views.

The Appeal

The appeal of the video can be understood as consisting of three key ingredients.

#1. Cute kids are cute.
#2. Skilled covers of pop songs are crowd pleasers.
#3. Incorrect lyrical interpretations are funny (see: Ken Lee)

Derivatives

Earlier covers of I'm Yours had been uploaded to Youtube prior, but following the overnight success of Uke3453, even more covers of the song followed. At least one imitated the young Japanese boy's interpretation of the lyrics, countless others reuploaded the video, and others added annotations.

The young internet star even had an appearance on CNN to talk about the recent phenomenon. [find video]