It took mega streamer Ludwig Ahgren less than a week after abandoning Twitch for YouTube to get temporarily banned from Google’s video platform. His mistake? Briefly streaming the smash hit children’s song Baby Shark.
Ahgren was livestreaming himself watching other YouTube videos on just his third day on the platform when the feed went dead for the roughly 25,000 people watching. In a video uploaded to a secondary channel yesterday, he explained what happened.
“I was trying to look at the 50 most classic vintage greatest YouTube videos of all time to find what the single greatest YouTube video of all-time was,” he said. “And on the way I ended up listening to just a few seconds of Baby Shark which I won’t dare listen to for another second for the love of god. I am pretty sure the corporate overlords who own Baby Shark have an iron fist on YouTube, and so they took me down.”
Ahgren said he assumed that YouTube’s copyright ID system would simply flag the stream on the backend to apply the proper revenue splits rather than take him offline altogether, a miscalculation he won’t be making again. “This is a good note for the future,” he said. “It is kind of crazy that in the first four days on YouTube I got banned and in the first four years on Twitch I never got banned but growing pains, we’re getting through it.”
Before becoming the most recent high-profile Twitch streamer to leave the Amazon-owned streaming platform, Ahgren was known for breaking the record earlier this year for most subscribers ever. That distinction came after an around the clock subathon that lasted more than 30 days.
Copyrighted music has long been an issue for streamers who can see their work paused or temporarily torpedoed for even the smallest offenses. Baby Shark is probably more of a lightning rod for legal trouble than most, however. The song has been around for a while, but a rendition of it by South Korean kids education company Pinkfong in 2016 went on to become the most-viewed YouTube video ever after it was watched over 9 billion times.
Children who probably shouldn’t be watching YouTube in the first place have been inflicting it on parents ever since. Now even streamers are learning to fear its lyrical deathgrip.