Track by Spring space music producer goes viral as a TikTok dance problem
Last month, record producer and songwriter Jordi Guillem suddenly woke up early in the morning after his phone exploded with messages from friends and people in the music industry asking if he’d seen what happened.
Guillem had no idea what was going on and immediately began checking links that were being sent to him. He realized that one of his songs had become part of a viral sensation around the world.
A hit that Guillem of Spring wrote and produced in 2001 entitled “Deja Que Mueva Mueva Mueva” by Sonia Y Selena is regaining popularity as a dance challenge on TikTok. The news came as a surprise, said Guillem, and perfect for the song’s 20th anniversary.
“It’s super gratifying to see so many people from all over the world, especially Russia, Italy and Spain, dancing to your song and having fun with the pandemic right now,” Guillem said. “Just to see how a little piece of music can bring joy to so many people, even if it only lasts a minute – it’s just a nice feeling.”
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“Deja Que Mueva Mueva Mueva” was written by Guillem in 2001 for an album by Sonia Y Selena called “Yo Quiero Bailar”. Guillem said the song was a hit in Spain back then and chartered number one for several weeks that summer.
Guillem said people from Spain and other countries, including the media, spoke about it. He said it was like an overnight hit.
Today Guillem runs his own production company called Exito Music with a recording studio in the Klein area. He is primarily a pop-rock producer but has worked in various genres such as electronic dance music, hip-hop, urban latin, classical and country.
Talk about the city
Until last week, Guillem said nearly 30,000 people had choreographed and recorded a video of themselves dancing to the song. He said the actual number of times the song has been played since it went viral again has been in the millions.
Guillem didn’t even know how TikTok worked and had to download the app to scroll through tons of videos.
Most of the videos are in other languages, so Guillem translated comments, but he said the actual messages from the recordings are universal, how people use the challenge to celebrate a particular occasion or idea, like hoping for the end the pandemic.
He said several nurses and doctors shared videos as well.
“They pretty much create a vision of when the pandemic will end and what they’re going to do,” Guillem said. “They’ll just throw that mask away and go crazy and dance in the club.”
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The TikTok challenge started in late 2020 after the first video was uploaded to social media sometime in November. According to Guillem, the number of participants was 21,000 at the end of January and rose to around 29,000 on February 4.
“That really got me. … Not just in a certain region, but everywhere and it seems like it is expanding very quickly, ”he said. “So it’s like almost 1,000 new people doing the video every day.”
“Huge phenomenon”
Guillem said the project started when he and other producers from Spain decided in the early 2000s to create a female duet, did casting and selected the artists to make the full album.
He remembers looking at the Spanish market back then and realizing that there was nothing like the Spanish dance songs they created.
After presenting a small demo to Vale Music, Guillem said the record label tested the songs by playing them out loud to wake up attendees during a recording of the reality show Big Brother in Spain titled Gran Hermano.
“The reaction they had was that they would get up and jump off their beds and dance to the songs,” Guillem said. “So the whole country of Spain immediately began to know the songs and to sing them.”
In a matter of days, the song became popular and people were downloading the song for free before the album was even released, which panicked the record label about lost sales, Guillem said. He recalls the label president telling them they had two weeks to finish the album because the label needed to get it to stores right away.
As a result, Guillem said the group locked themselves in a studio and finished the album quickly but with a lot of passion because they knew it was going to be special. He said that five other songs were composed by him and the other producers made a collection of five more.
According to Guillem, the group had shows every day during the summer and sometimes did up to two or three shows a day.
“That summer 2001 you went to every club, turned on every radio, everything was Sonia Y Selena, everywhere,” he said. “It was a huge phenomenon. I can’t think of any other song that went so viral then and now 20 years later for no reason that the same story repeats itself. “
Other songs from the album produced by Guillem are “Que Viva La Noche”, “Tequila” and “When The Sun Goes”. Another song on the album that met with great success was “Yo Quiero Bailar”.
The publisher and label of “Deja Que Mueva Mueva Mueva” is now Universal Music Group, which Vale Music acquired in 2006. Guillem is considered the author and producer of the song.
“That’s the part I love most about the music business – seeing how to make a song and how that three-minute song finds its way around the world is pretty amazing to me,” said Guillem.
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