“Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” by Kevin MacLeod

Kevin MacLeod

Kevin MacLeod is a musician that traces his musical origins to New York City. Much isn’t known about him considering that, despite regular social media users having inevitably heard his work before, he isn’t a musical A lister or anything like that. Rather, Kevin has made a name for himself as an artist that specializes essentially creating “free” music. 

In other words, the songs he puts out, including “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys”, are royalty-free. They are granted a Creative Commons license, which basically means anyone can use them at will, so long as individual credits MacLeod for his creation. Or for a small fee of about $50 or less, interested parties can use said tunes without crediting him. 

Either way, whereas MacLeod obviously isn’t making a gazillion dollars like some other musicians, he has received notable support from some fans and other entities. For example, he took home the international Honorary Web Video Award via the European Web Video Academy in 2015.

It has been noted that MacLeod’s songs, including “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys”, have been heavily utilized, especially by the likes of websites, internet shows/personalities and even everyday netizens. 

They are compelled to do so due to the fact that – as anyone who has uploaded content using somebody else’s music onto YouTube for instance may already know – international music copyright laws can be quite stringent and vary from place to place.

Facts about “Monkey Spinning Monkeys”

“Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” was both written and produced by Kevin MacLeod. And he made the song public on 6 February 2014. 

The song was published under MacLeod’s own label, if you want to refer to it as such, called Incompetech.

“Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” is purely an instrumental song. What this means is that it contains no lyrics.

In the first week of October 2021, this song lit up the internet. It was so popular that at some point it became the most popular video on TikTok.