Finding K-Pop Nyan Song

by Rian

I was listening to Korean radio today. As a classical music fan, radio isn’t exactly my go-to for musics, but the radio was on nonetheless. Then it hit me like a freight truck. Or, like a tabby cat suddenly jumping on my laps so I chocked a little with some coffee in my mouth. It was most hilarious hymn, repeating “nyan nyan nyan” by K-Pop stars; I had to look up what the hell was going on. Is this a tributary song to the internet meme? Are there actual boy band humming “meow” in Korean? So many questions.

Unfortunately, by the time I grabbed my phone for Shazam the radio had moved on to commercials. I recall either SoundHound or Shazam had ‘recently searched songs in your area’ feature, but that was up to no avail. So my search for the mysterious K-Pop stars began.

As anyone wise in the way of internet would tell you to do, I googled “radio recent songs”. Looking back, that was the obvious mistake. Google doesn’t work as much as it should in Korean. Several blog posts from 2022 or 2023 —again, I emphasize they were in Korean— mentioned using a Korean streaming app, Melon, or its website. Again, this was another mistake. Many apps and services available only in Korea are often region locked. Melon app wasn’t available for the U.S. region App Store. And its website, which opted to offer mobile and PC separately, no longer featured recent songs on radio. So let’s recap. Google failed me with mostly out of date blog posts. Melon, a Korean streaming app, was region locked. I don’t know if the app still offers the feature I’m looking for, but safe to say, Melon was irrelevant at this point.

This time I searched, with same keywords, on Naver and Daum. Korea has two domestic search engines, and they both act as web portals. The results were mostly the same, talking about Melon, except few posts stood out. Apparently if you enter a very specific set of keywords on Daum, the portal has a not-so-hidden, but failed-to-advertise feature, which is the recent songs on radio. This is yet another mistake. The mobile web for Daum only shows few songs going back few minutes; whereas the ‘PC’ version goes back indefinitely, or so the blog post detailed. To my dismay, while the Korean blog post was correct that Daum did have independent PC version, their recent songs on radio only went back only so far as few minutes. The feature was provided with the help of Melon, the same Melon has region locks, so checking out any songs from Daum redirected me straight back to App Store with a region lock pop-up.

What happened next was by pure luck. The radio was still tuned at the same frequency and blurted out what station it’s playing, the usual: ‘You are listening to ……’ kinda stuff. It had been about 30 minutes since this rabbit hole of a search began, and again, it was by pure luck that the song was on the scheduled playlist for the program, instead of obscured into the oblivion that is one of the requested songs. Here it was, my long-waited cat song, sitting on a HTML div table.

Korea had rough transitions to smartphones, and frankly, I think the country isn’t done yet. Most popular apps and services simply don’t work in Korea as much as it does in, say, Europe, U.S., or even Canada. And its place, local apps with region locks are adding and dropping features left and right haphazardly, or should I say Facebook-esquely, because they all seem to be trying to be one bad app to replace them all.

On a more happier side note, the mysterious tune singing “nyan nyan nyan” turns out to be this. Yes, it is a well-dressed K-Pop boy band. And no, the song wasn’t reenacting the historic moment of internet. It was a good case of mondegreen. Did certainly put some smiles on my face. The song was on Apple Music without live lyrics or karaoke support, but one can hope.

Takeaways

So if you are going for how to find that “recent songs on radio” in South Korea, tough luck, you need to listen closely until the station does a shoutout. As far as I could tell, Melon is probably the only app that covers such a thing, but most likely it will ask for a Korean phone number. If SoundHound or Shazam couldn’t match it in time, I would take following course of actions:

1. Take note of what station you were listing to, and at what time.
2. Google the station and find what program you were listening to using time as reference.
3. Some radio programs don’t post their playlist right away. If that’s the case, come back tomorrow. Some programs don’t post the playlist for requested songs either, then tough luck (perhaps email the station to find out).

By the way, the station that I had to look up had quite the terrible Windows 8 style, tile UI. I ended up randomly clicking things just to figure out what is a text and what isn’t. If you were planning to use translation add-on on your browser, I don’t think it’d be much of help since most of the stylized texts were just image files.