About

Royalty Free Ukulele is a piece of upbeat, inoffensive music featuring the ukulele, glockenspiel, and acoustic guitar that can be used by artists and creators for free. The ubiquity of the track has made it infamous on YouTube, where it has been used and covered in dozens of ironic ways.

Origin

The "Royalty Free Ukulele" track is called "Carefree." It was composed by Kevin McLeod and uploaded to royalty-free music site incompetech^[1] on August 16th, 2014.

Spread

The track began to spread in infamy following a November 30th, 2015 video by YouTuber Pyrocynical ^[2] in which he says others have noticed his distaste of "royalty free music" followed by a video of a boy playing "Carefree" terribly (shown below, left). A little over a month later, he uploaded a video where he spoke at length about the track and remarked that while it's a piece of good music, its use in YouTube had made saturated the market, making it a cringeworthy piece of music (shown below, right)

After Pyrocynical's exposure, the track began appearing in various remixes and ironic covers on YouTube. Inspired by Pyrocynical, another user paired the music with a speech from Adolf Hitler, gaining over 138,000 views before being deleted. Others picked up on Pyrocynical's point that pairing the music with any footage would make the footage appear slightly happier in various other remixes.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References