Shooting Stars

Origin: a B-side that waited eight years

“Shooting Stars” is a track by the Sydney electronic duo Bag Raiders — Jack Glass and Chris Stracey — first released as a B-side in 2008 and then properly as a single in August 2009. It did respectably at home, landing number 18 in Australia’s Triple J Hottest 100 of 2009, and then sat quietly in the catalogue for most of a decade.

Its meme career started small. Know Your Meme dates the first documented use to December 29, 2015, when YouTube user Glaceygirl paired the song with a crude animation. The format did not catch until January 23, 2017, when a video setting the track over footage of a man’s spectacular pool dive drew over 530,000 views and hit the front page of r/videos.

The format

The edit is rigidly structured, which is why thousands of people could make one:

1. A real clip of someone falling, faceplanting, being launched off something, or otherwise losing control of their body.
2. The moment of impact never arrives. Instead the subject is cut out and composited over a starfield — usually with 1980s synthwave grids, neon sunsets and drifting planets.
3. The beat drops, and the subject tumbles gently through space forever.

The comic logic is a kind of mercy. Rather than laughing at the crash, the format launches the victim into orbit, converting a painful pratfall into a serene cosmic drift. It pairs naturally with vaporwave-era nostalgia, and it works on animals, cartoon characters and inanimate objects just as well as people.

Spread and chart return

The meme peaked through 2017. An early Harambe tribute version in July 2016 gathered over 150,000 views; countless fail-compilation edits followed; and in August 2017 the format appeared in Katy Perry’s “Swish Swish” music video, which took 38 million views in its first 72 hours — a mainstream pop video quoting a YouTube edit format.

The commercial effect on an eight-year-old song was remarkable. In 2017 “Shooting Stars” charted in markets it had never touched:

• UK number 83, Germany number 55, Canada number 88, Austria number 56, France number 94.
• US Dance/Electronic Songs number 11 and number 9 on Bubbling Under the Hot 100.
• Certifications followed: gold in Australia, silver in the UK, gold in Germany.

Bag Raiders have taken it well, saying they are pleased the meme introduced the track to an audience that was in primary school when they wrote it, while admitting they cannot fully explain why this song became the sound of falling through space.

Why it lasted

Most sound memes burn out when the drop stops surprising anyone. “Shooting Stars” survived because it is emotionally warm rather than mocking — it belongs with Coffin Dance in the small category of edits that respond to disaster with style instead of cruelty. It returned again on TikTok in 2024, applied to anime edits and dance clips, where individual videos pulled well over a million likes.

The audio remains a stock reply to any video where someone is about to have a very bad landing.