About

If You Play This Song On New Year's Eve refers to a snowclone popular on Twitter in which users say that if one starts a song at a specific time on New Year's Eve, then a specific moment in the song will happen the moment the new year begins.

Origin

On December 13th, 2017, Reddit user tomboytom^[3] uploaded a text post to /r/Frankocean which read "If you start listening to « Nights » on December 31st at 11:56:30pm, the transition in the song will be perfectly synched with the switch from 2017 to 2018, at midnight. Nice way to end/start the year." The post gained 2,700 upvotes.

Spread

On December 15th, 2017, Twitter user @blondedocean^[1] reposted the text. The tweet gained over 92,000 retweets and 284,000 likes (shown below). The meme spread further when on December 16th, 2017, Twitter user @tmcripple^[2] posted a tweet which stated that if a person begins playing Evanescence's "Bring To My Life" at 11:59:08 on New Year's Eve, the "Wake Me Up" part of the song will play at midnight exactly. The tweet gained over 77,000 retweets and 189,000 likes (shown below).

The popularity of these tweets inspired many popular tweets utilizing the format. For example, Twitter user @dearlyfinn^[4] posted a tweet about the Stranger Things introduction theme, gaining over over 16,000 retweets and 49,000 likes (shown below, left). Twitter user @brfootball^[5] made a similar joke using the theme of Football's Champions League, gaining over 6,500 retweets and 11,000 likes (shown below, right). Buzzfeed covered the meme on December 17th.^[6]

Enter2018right

On December 26th, 2017, a single-serving site called Enter2018right.com^[7] launched. The site is designed to start certain songs at the exact time necessary for a particular moment in the song to play as 2017 ends. The site features sixteen choices for users to choose from, all from popular examples of the meme, including "Man's Not Hot", "Bring Me To Life," and "Africa".

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References